


Binary Star

by TriffidsandCuckoos



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Established Relationship, Flashbacks, Future Fic, M/M, Mutual Pining, Outer Space, Plot, Plotty, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Canon, Post-Series, Prophets, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Space Flight, Space Stations, sPAAAACE, space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:54:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 35,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22352908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TriffidsandCuckoos/pseuds/TriffidsandCuckoos
Summary: After abandoning the Earth in the wake of a more environmental apocalypse, humanity has taken to the stars. Crowley stayed behind to restore the Earth; Aziraphale followed the humans into space. After almost two centuries, the latest prophet arrives in Aziraphale’s archive, determined to rectify this.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 49
Kudos: 95
Collections: Good Omens Big Bang 2019





	Binary Star

**Author's Note:**

> Art by the incredibly talented [myssiesart](https://myssiesart.tumblr.com/). This fic would absolutely not have happened without the extraordinary beta skills of [theoldaquarian](https://theoldaquarian.tumblr.com/) and the wonderful cheerleading of [flightinflame](https://flightinflame.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Author takes responsibility for the gross inaccuracies in both space and science fiction, of which there are many.

In a green field in what was once called England (and may be again), there is an apple tree.

In truth there are many apple trees, for this is an orchard. Moreover, it is an orchard in a place which for a relatively short time had boasted the quaint name of Tadfield, and the apples aren’t just on the branches but in the air itself, a siren call for scrumping and cider and scumble the earth will answer if nothing else does.

However, one tree is more remarkable – not for the green-gold of its leaves or its collection of fruit, but for the black scales entwined amongst its branches. A narrow head dips down, scarlet tongue tasting the sweet air, before it curls closer to one particular apple, yellower than some, suspended at the very tip of the branch.

"If you don't get redder," Crowley hisses, despite the proliferation of consonants, "I'll get the humans back down here."

Scaring the plants is so much easier these days.

\---

You can't maintain a discouraging air of mould and dust on a spaceship. Quite the opposite is required: dirt attracts far too much attention from people who have a rather better moral standing than the men in suits of Soho long ago. Even dim lighting attracts helpful citizens offering assistance with the LED blocks. Space will be grim and filthy in time, and where the humans have already stopped they have indeed gravitated towards their default state. Nevertheless, the Fleet at least will fit their old cinematic ideal for as long as they can manage.

That said, you don't need subtle psychological tricks these days. You just have to offer books on a spaceship. Which is to say that Aziraphale had a great deal of time to himself aboard the _Miraculous_ (née _Orpheus_ , although he’s the only individual who remembers the renaming ceremony).

It isn’t a bookshop anymore. It’s a branch of The Archive, probably the most obscure of all those spread out across the Fleet. People always seem surprised to find he exists at all as they stumble in following an unintentionally obscure request, or full of young academic fervour up until he explains there aren’t even touchscreens here. For most, the books elicit an emotion on the spectrum between confusion and patronising charm, with a side order of derision. Fortunately, blank smiles remain as useful as ever, alongside directions towards the museums or recommendations for _other_ branches.

As much as Aziraphale should promote the virtues of free knowledge, _his_ archive is something highly preserved – a spot of history floating amidst the stars, he likes to think. Usually he much prefers to take a book to his adjoining rooms (it's hard to say where archive becomes bedroom, the physics alone pain the mind), where he can look out on the vast expanse of stars with one of Oscar’s or Jane’s for company. It should bother him that so few humans take an interest in reading the physical souvenirs of Earth. Instead, he rather enjoys the quiet, and the solitude.

If the books have labelled him quite the oddity onboard, his white clothing has made quite the comeback, leaving only the tartan defending his appearance of harmless eccentricity. It’s a detail which leads people to label him a Solist (an improvement on ‘Luddite,’ at least) and slide him into an patronisingly indulgent pigeon hole (not that they use that phrase anymore either). It stops them asking how he requisitioned it, and thus prevents any efforts at improvisation or, if you prefer, lying. If you really look, your eyes might suddenly spot a dark red pocket square, miracled to last, made of some of the last silk on Earth. The miracle justifies itself over and over, with the way his fingers constantly find it, almost surprised, and slide over the liquid smoothness like, well, certainly not like a snake. A compromise, as ever. Crowley would hate to be remembered through a bow tie.

Perhaps it’s petty, miracling dust onto a book just to blow it off again. Aziraphale can’t help liking the simple things, and it’s not like it’ll do any damage to the air circulation onboard. Everyone assumes there must be a recycling vent somewhere in this branch of the Archive, and so does Aziraphale, which means he can blessedly do without the ugly thing dominating the far wall. The air moves as he expects; there’s even a low hum emitting from _somewhere_ , since he does find the mechanical workings of the ship pleasant in much the same way he used to listen to the partygoers of Old Soho or Ancient Rome (not that either thought of themselves as anything but Present). Oddly, he took to the murmur of machines much easier than the constant rattle of keyboards. No wonder that Crowley only sold him on what was then modern technology when he could skip over that nonsense.

He has drawn the line, however, at Fleet tea of any brand (from the painful attempt at a pun of ‘Fleat’ to the oddly literal ‘Earth Leaves’). Long had he argued with Crowley that miracled food and drink never has the same taste (there’s a reason why accounts of the Loaves and Fishes skip over the flavours, and moreover why the disciples never seemed keen for a repeat performance when it was just them). However, compared with the standard freeze-dried abominations, miracled Lapsang is still Lapsang, and this way (Aziraphale thinks rather magnanimously) the black tea plants in the luxury biome might reach more humans.

_Since when do you care? What happened to gluttony, eh, angel?_

His hands pause on the rim of the miracled china teacup (again, never the same, but in for a penny, in for a pound – or whatever the phrase had become now). There it is again: the ghost of Crowley at his ear. Never the actual voice, the one he wants to hear, the low drawl coupled with a figure flung as carelessly as a jacket over his sofa. After so many millennia, you gain a feel for each other’s speech patterns, no matter how poorly you mimic them when you open your mouth – something Aziraphale’s learnt from bitter experience, when he’s tried repeating them aloud. Better to keep quiet and just listen to the thoughts – and that’s all they are, just thoughts. No real Crowley. Not here.

_That’s it, have a good wallow. Does wonders for the soul, that. Shall I go steal a Stradivarius, set the mood?_

One violin made by Stradivarius still exists in the universe. It lives in one of the ship museums, the kind which exist on every vessel and whose prices have been steadily rising. (That isn’t Aziraphale’s business, and he still wanders in whenever he pleases.) Crowley had had one in his vault, it turned out – or his storage space, or whatever he was using at the time. Aziraphale knows nothing about its provenance, nor to whom Crowley sold it to buy a little extra space on a ship. He just knows that sometimes when he visits that particular museum he can see Crowley’s long fingers moving so gently, the bow sweeping smoothly or gouging Hellish shrieks depending on whether he knew Aziraphale was there. 

And there he is, reminiscing again. About useless things, constantly touching the memories until their edges fray and the images fade. Not that they will. He hopes.

\---

_It was raining at Adam's funeral. Aziraphale supposed that made sense._

_Crowley was holding the umbrella with a twist to his mouth like the lemon he put in drinks, which might look like a smile to humans less experienced with the full nuances of expression available after six thousand years with more or less the same face. If Aziraphale could draw, he fancied he could try capturing some of that eclecticism, but, despite certain beliefs about angels, even his stick figures had a rather tortured feeling to them of those whose very existence is pain. Better to leave the looking and the art to Crowley, who was after all far more gifted at both._

_"That's that, then," Crowley muttered._

_"Hmm?" Aziraphale asked, still thinking about Crowley staring at him over brioche and strawberry jam that morning, hair mussed and much the same colour as that spread over enriched dough._

_"End of the world."_

_Aziraphale fussed with his sleeves. "There's no need to be dramatic about it, dear."_

_"It is, though." The umbrella swayed slightly, and when Aziraphale glanced down Crowley's knuckles had somehow endeavoured to grow even paler around the handle. "He's the one who wanted to save it all. Stupid idea, mortality. Who put that idea in his head? Complete waste."_

_Crowley had never worn mourning well._

_"I suppose he thought that was all part of it. They write about it fairly often, you know." Aziraphale could readily recall both the stuff of legends and multitudinous works of so-called 'dark fantasy' of extremely questionable literary value. "The value of a limited lifespan. It's supposed to make their lives more...real," he finished, rather more lamely than he'd like._

_"Well, of course they're going to say that. They're hardly going to say 'gosh, isn't this awful, what a terrible state of affairs, we really got the wrong end of the deal, what have the turtles got that we don't'."_

_Aziraphale said nothing._

_"Besides shells."_

_Out of habit, they were lurking at the edge of the funeral. An outdoor, non-secular service, before the scattering of the ashes. Not much of the old gang present, for precisely the reasons Crowley was bemoaning. As a rule, the two of them generally tried not to get too involved with groups, which always felt much worse as they all passed away. Aziraphale hadn’t felt like this since the early twentieth century; he wasn’t certain with regard to Crowley, although he had his suspicions about the way he wouldn’t mention the 1930s. Just as well they’d found each other again, really._

_"Right. I'm done."_

_"No, you're not.”_

_"Yes, I am. Here," and Crowley thrust the umbrella at him with an impressive amount of force for a distance of a couple of inches._

_"I'm not leaving."_

_"Well, goody for you," Crowley said through his teeth._

_He stayed, though, naturally. Until the end._

_Those present hailed from all walks of life, although Aziraphale could pick out Anathema and Newt's twins amidst the sprawl of descendants of the Them, varying relations who generally all answered to 'cousin'. There were a fair number of environmentalists present as well, Adam's organisations alongside others who had ironically ended up revering him. The Antichrist's death made worldwide news, although his original birth status didn't feature anywhere in his obituaries. Technically this was the more intimate ceremony, in that Aziraphale and Crowley deployed multiple miracles to keep the press thoroughly in the dark (which admittedly still came easier to Aziraphale). Adam had touched a lot of people; inspired so many. Aziraphale might have been something of a retired angel now, yet whenever he closed his eyes he can feel it: the thoughts and prayers and emotions. Not like the media coverage at all. People who knew Adam as a real person._

_"He lasted longer than thirty-three years," Aziraphale said, with that joking tone which approximately one syllable in realised this wasn't a joke and awkwardly sidled to the end with its back to the wall and an eye on the nearest exit._

_Sure enough, Crowley levelled an incredulous eyebrow at him. "You think that makes a difference? Getting one up on Jesus?"_

_"Logically? It should."_

_Crowley heaved a sigh. "Don't know what logic has to do with it, angel."_

_Aziraphale considered an awkward punch to the shoulder, as he’d seen the humans do, before he remembered that he was allowed to link their arms now. His fingers covered Crowley's on the umbrella. "Not like you to be so pessimistic, dear."_

_"Just a feeling," Crowley said, in a voice laden with 'that went down like a lead balloon'. "Really thought we had a chance, there. Not so sure, now."_

_Aziraphale didn’t ask which 'we' Crowley meant. Around them, the grass and trees drank in the rain._

_Rainy days were for reading inside, a human invention he’d always been grateful for. Being out in the steadily building downpour felt too much like the Flood._

\---

All too soon, another back-cover falls closed. The good ended happily, the bad unhappily, although Aziraphale reflects that really Oscar should have said that fiction meant having an ending at all. Once upon a time, they’d all had one. Then life kept on going.

With a sigh, he leaves his empty wine glass to select his next book to revisit. Sliding the leather cover home (the only leather left in the galaxy, perhaps), he remains poised as best he can on the penultimate rung of his ladder to peer at the next shelf down. There’s no order to it, or none that a human mind could comprehend. Be it piles beside a shared bed or shelves of a shop in Soho groaning under the weight of esoteric arrangement, all that matters is that he knows where everything rests. 

As he runs his thumb along the illegible spine which hides an original edition of _Frankenstein_ (not autographed to him but rather to a certain red-haired lady), wondering if it actually is too soon to revisit this one, a voice says, "Fuck, it’s worse than I thought."

He does not move from his ladder (the kind on wheels, which never fails to cause consternation amongst visitors). Instead, he takes _Frankenstein_ off the shelf after all, to read its inscription again. 

"You're in space, didn't the travelling teach you anything about cutting back? I know economy isn’t your thing but this is fucking ridiculous. Who even needs this much paper?"

Wincing a little, he gazes down at the curling shapes on the page and can’t resist mouthing a waspish reflection on language and its appropriateness based on time and place. Sometimes there’s nothing for it but to simply ignore someone. You might say that it’s his fault for leaving the armchair.

The slide of paper across wood makes him look up sharply. There’s a girl in his archive, eighteen years old at most, and she’s cleared a spot on his main desk with all the grace and care of a bulldozer. As he splutters in indignation, she actually heaves herself up into the spot she’s made, levelling a look at him usually found in someone defying divine providence to strike them down.

A long time has passed since Aziraphale was in the avenging angel business. That hardly matters. “Get down from there,” he snaps, and for all the defiance scrunched up in her shoulders, she does so. Clearly this goes against her plan, from the way she glares, but if glares affected Aziraphale then he wouldn’t have made it very far at all. ( _And we both know who’s got the real venom in their eyes._ ) As if to make up for her failing, she crosses her arms and tilts her head as if she is the one who has to appraise _him_. 

She’s a little short for her age – which, granted, means that a couple of centuries ago she would have been of average height – with hair streaked fluorescent pink and blood scarlet and and sky blue falling every which way over her shoulders. (No, not ‘sky blue’, last time Aziraphale saw something described as that colour it was closer to indigo than anything else.) Her clothes are the usual mix of silver and white repeated across the archive’s visitors, albeit somewhat disrupted by a pair of jet-black boots replete with fastenings which take him back to at least the Regency. She’s fairly swamped in her jacket, the cuffs shoved up from her hands and the hem brushing her knees. Her face shimmers with soft glitter, jarring with the eyeliner that rings more of excess than precision and the slightly chaotic lipstick. In all, she looks like a teenager trying to be an adult, and if she had announced herself in any other way he might even have been sympathetic. 

As it is, he very slowly and reverentially closes his book (as much as he’d love to snap it shut to make a point, Mary Shelley deserves more respect), never taking his eyes off of her, then equally slowly descends the ladder and walks over to the other side of the desk. “And how might I help you, young lady? Do you require directions?”

“Nope,” she says, popping it in a way Aziraphale hadn’t heard for a long while. “This is where I meant to be.”

“Ah,” he says, readying himself for the only type of war he’s ever found satisfying. “Well, I’m sure that if you have the appropriate identification and qualifications – and of course experience in this field, the handling of these manuscripts is hardly – ”

She groans, long and extravagant, in the unmistakable fashion which ages a human better than any wrinkles. “I’m not here to see this shit. I’m here to see you.”

“Young lady,” he says, mouth tight, “if that is the tone you are going to take – ”

“You’re not busy. I know that.”

“Do you now.” If he weren’t investing his miracles in tea and book preservation, he would simply dismiss her from the shop. That said, given they’re currently in a large metal object in space, the margin for error is a little too small to risk it. More’s the pity. 

Channelling the weary sigh of every archivist he’s ever encountered, Aziraphale asks, “May I ask your name, or is that too much bother?” 

“Andy.”

“Oh.” His annoyance snaps out in surprise. “That’s, er. That’s…pleasant.” Humans have always gone through fashions in naming, and like most fashions there are some which die forever and other which come back if you wait long enough. Crowley had explained this on average once a year for their entire lives before leaving (which gave some idea of how often he mentioned it towards the end). Aziraphale had preferred living in hope.

Still. He can’t say that _that_ was a name he was hoping to hear again.

“You hate it.”

“I most certainly did not say that.”

She snorts. “’S shorter.”

“Than what?”

“Than the full name.” She eyes him. “Going to be a problem?”

“That rather depends on why you’re here, now doesn’t it?”

She nods with a soft hum, eyes darting around the room. “Nice place.”

“You didn’t think so a moment ago.”

“Still don’t. I’m being polite.”

“I think that word might have evolved a bit further than I’m familiar with, I’m afraid.” As he speaks, she wanders over to the nearest shelf, and he bristles as she runs a finger just underneath the spines of the books. “Young lady, I will have to ask you to – ”

“Not so sure living alone suits you,” she announces. “I know you’ve always had these hermit tendencies but this seems fucked up even for you.”

“I assure you, you know nothing whatsoever about me.” Aziraphale reconsiders the option of simply miracling her away. It’s growing more appealing by the second. “Now, I’m afraid, _young lady_ , that I am going to have to ask you to leave,” he indicates the door behind her, “unless of course you want me to contact either your family or whatever authorities – ”

"I know that you miss him."

Aziraphale's hand freezes in midair. He barely notices, not with an imagined breath on his neck, a touch to his wrist. Too late, it occurs to him that she doesn’t know a thing. It’s the certainty that fools him, perhaps, or the way she jerks her chin up as if daring him to deny it. Or it’s just him being a fool. “I have no idea – That’s not – You don’t know – ” Every fragment sounds messier, the language escaping him because just like that, Crowley is there, at the front of his mind, crowding out the present.

She nods, apparently satisfied. “Didn’t think you could lie about that.”

He rests his weight against the desk, wiping a hand across his face. Just like that, the weight drops back on his shoulders. "I hardly think it’s any of your business," he says, clearing his throat the way he has done since before Britain existed and long after it stopped, as if expressing emotion were as inconvenient as a hairball. “And I don’t know who you mean.”

“Of course you don’t. Same way if I said the name ‘Crowley’” She stops as he flinches ( _angel_ ), hands clasping together tightly. “Yes. That.”

He glares at her. This feels like being flayed open; like standing face-to-face with the archangels and knowing all the secrets they would criticise. She has no right to be here. “What would you know about it?”

Carefully she leans against the desk, although he’s gratified that she doesn’t try to hop up again. "I see stuff,” she announces. “Past, future, I don't know, it's all pretty blurry and abstract and probably something my physics programme would be interested in if I ever actually logged in properly. Like it's my fault the security on it's so weak," she added in a low mutter, the sort of long-held grudge Aziraphale could either take no interest in or spend many hours over tea with. When someone fancied a good bitch, they tended to care more about the attention than whether or not their audience had technically been present in an unaging state for rather longer than standard human practice. 

“You’re a prophet?” Old habits do indeed die hard, and Aziraphale gathered prophecies until humanity left Earth and long afterwards. He hasn’t heard of many recently, though. These days, it seems the visions of the future all come from the broadcasts which used to blare into the archive before he ‘accidentally’ melted the speakers. 

Andy shrugs, as if such a question can be simply shaken away. "Maybe? Mostly I put it down in words, just because I feel I should. And, well, you two are in there. A lot." She paused. " _A lot_."

"Well, we have been around for a while," he says with what he hopes is a light breezy laugh ( _It never is, angel_ ), "I imagine we would pop up a bit."

Slowly she tilts her head to the side, eyes narrowed, as if trying to make him come into focus. "'Pop up a bit'."

"Occur," he offers with a wave of his hand as if this could be part of the trick ( _Please, don't, angel, I'm begging you_ ). "In the background. Although I suppose there was that apocalypse business in the twenty-first century?"

She makes a noise which is less like a hum than an engine firmly refusing to start. Bodies being the sympathetic sort, particularly when inhabited by angelic essence, Aziraphale's throat gives a twinge. "Can I get you some water?"

"I – " She shakes her head more than a simple 'no' warrants, unless she's also trying to bat away a bee. Then Aziraphale remembers that there aren't any bees anymore.

"You two are _everywhere_ ," she growls – actually growls, which happens less often than human literature would have you believe. "All of history as an option, and most of it with one or both of you 'popping up'." The derision isn't novel for Aziraphale, but he would have rather she hadn't mocked the accent. He's had it from new. "All of history, and the stuff that _whatever this is_ thinks is important is you two flirting across millennia."

"We were most certainly not flirting."

"Believe me, I'm doing you a favour calling it that. I've seen five year olds do a better job.” She shudders, quite unnecessarily he feels. “Oysters? Seriously? The fuck even is an oyster?"

"Something humans killed a long time ago," Aziraphale says sharply. "When humans did various things to the oceans, most of which you would learn from school if you ever went."

Her mouth twists in mock sympathy – not even very good mocking, Aziraphale hasn't seen it in so long but he has a perfect recollection of what a properly mocking grin should look like. "Don't like thinking about lost time?"

"Get out."

"What?"

Aziraphale might not have quite the height usually granted angelic corporations, but he makes do with what he has. "Young lady, I have indulged you for quite a while, but you really should be attending your lessons – "

"You mean turning the screen on."

" _Regardless_ , you have no business being here, poking into matters which do not concern you in the slightest, so _kindly leave_."

"Doesn't look like anyone has business here," she mutters. Then she shoves a hand into her jacket –presumably originally belonging to a male-coded individual if it has decent pockets – and produces a hand-sized reader, of the type issued as standard onboard. Her hands swipe across the screen as she vocalises low in her throat, before she thrusts it out at him. “Just look. See if you believe me.”

\---

_Honestly, there's not much point in checking the American deserts. Things grow here, not like in the Sahara (so unpleasant on his stomach, but it does him good to visit the pyramids and remember an occult and an ethereal being forever failing to grasp mathematics). They're not things which have ever really needed help to survive. Even the war to end the world couldn't faze a cactus._

_That's not why Crowley comes here._

_Twenty centuries (give or take) after She sent a boy down here who had no idea what he was up against, they ran tests here, and the place has tasted strange ever since. Back then all they thought you needed was a pair of sunglasses, and Hastur had set up a beauty pageant of all things. ‘Miss Atomic Bomb’, bizarrely creative for a demon who still thought fire was cutting edge._

_Still funny to think of Hastur as Not Here. Still, at least he went out with a bang. Literally._

\---

"’The fire shall ride the fire, till the atom splits and splits the toad into dust’," Aziraphale intoned, finding the voice out of practice but still with enough resonance to manage. "Rather old-fashioned prose, I would have thought. "

"Rich coming from you."

"Young lady, I remember when ‘old-fashioned’ meant only covering your genitalia." It's not the first association he has with the phrase, of course, but this isn't the time to think of dining at the Ritz and meeting at nine. "I meant that, well... You seem rather young. "

"Offence taken." She tries to snatch the reader back, which he thwarts through the dastardly tactic of taking a single step backwards. "This is why I don't – They just come to me, like that. I could rewrite them but I tried poetry once and I really don't think you'd prefer that."

"It can’t be that bad, surely."

"What rhymes with ‘polycarbonates’?"

Aziraphale's lips move, caught in the instinctive trap of ‘bolycarbonates’, ‘colycarbonates’, and so on and so forth. Fortunately angels have a very broad grasp of language, or at least can run through the alphabet very quickly. "I see."

He scrolls through a few more ‘prophecies’, although that’s hardly the correct term. “You are aware these mostly consist of the past? I question calling yourself a prophet in that sense. ‘Historian’ might be more appropriate.”

“You called me that,” she mutters. “And yes, it’s history, but it’s specific, isn’t it? So don’t you want to know what I’m doing here?”

“I do want to know how to make you leave.”

She rolls her eyes. “Don’t start that again.” Snatching the tablet back from him – he lets it go with what he feels is a fairly restrained ‘hmph’ – she flicks through a couple more, muttering to herself. Snatching a strand of hair out of her mouth, she intones (far worse than Aziraphale’s reading, he thinks smugly), “’The Earth shall be claimed by the snake, encircled, as the sword rusts away with history’.”

Expectantly she looks at Aziraphale – no, _triumphantly_ , as if this somehow proves anything.

“I still question your use of tenses,” he says. 

“You don’t care about the claiming part?”

“I don’t think you understand what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, for – ” She shoves the tablet back into her jacket, with all the youthful carelessness with technology that never ceases to make Aziraphale wince. (He had much the same reaction when printers would hit their presses to prove their solidity.) “Look. You’re here; your boyfriend’s there. On Earth. That isn’t right at all. So tell me just how _you_ make sense of that.”

It’s ever so tempting to refuse. It’s not as if having some visions entitles her to either of their lives. If nothing else, Aziraphale is no longer officially a part of Heaven, and thus a personage granted visions has no hold over him. If she were asking about anything else, he would tell her to go, and then he could simply return to his armchair and his memories.

However. ‘Claiming’. That has the ring of an accusation.

“If you simply _must_ know,” he says through gritted teeth, “we agreed on it.”

“Being apart like this?” She raises an eyebrow, and he realises that those are dyed as well. Hardly a beneficial use of time. “I’ve seen too much of you two to believe that.”

“You haven’t seen it all,” he tells her. “Because then you would notice that we actually do care about humanity, and the Earth – we don’t simply, oh, _make eyes_ at each other, or whatever you might be thinking.”

“I am going to be trying my fucking hardest not to think of you saying that _ever again_.”

Aziraphale doesn’t look at her. “The Earth was in a terrible state – that was why humanity was leaving, if you recall. You needed looking after, out here, and the Earth needed restoring. So I am here and he is there and that is all there is to it.” Or rather, all that she needs to hear. He knows there’s holes in it, the whole thing, because his mind spends far too many light-cycles circling around the ‘why’ of it. Why they couldn’t carry on talking, with all the clever machines humanity has devised. Why Crowley vanished.

Why he didn’t _tell him_.

One staying behind to make sure. Aziraphale has to assume that miracling the barrier from the outside wouldn't have worked somehow – or that there would be no way of guaranteeing the planet’s safety otherwise. “Once the Earth’s better, humanity can return. It’s as simple as that.”

"’Once the Earth’s better’,” she echoes.

"Well, somehow I doubt he's just sat there twiddling his thumbs," Aziraphale says with a smile that accidentally tips over into 'too much'. "I wouldn't know where to begin, restoring a world like that."

"That's what you think he's doing?"

"Obviously." He blinks at her. "What else would he be doing?"

Now it’s her turns to look away. "Nothing. That's – " She clears her throat. "I mean, for what it's worth, it _is_ what he's doing."

Relief surges through him. It’s silly and he tries to resist it, yet he finds himself helpless and also not inclined in the slightest to really try. He has no real reason to believe her and yet it’s like seeing the sun again. The original sun. 

"Yes,” he says. “Well. Good."

She nods slowly, the way you might for a small child who thinks he’s solved the universe. Despite the fact that he just wants to sink back and enjoy this feeling, something niggles at Aziraphale that he doesn’t like her expression at all.

“So – just curious,” she says, “how does he tell you that now’s the time?”

“Well, I.”

After a moment, she raised her eyebrows. “Well, you what?”

Aziraphale shifts slightly from side to side, trying not to let in the bitterness swirling at the edges. “He’ll…tell me.”

“ _How_?”

He tries to find that certainty in himself, the anchor that is Crowley. “He’ll find a way. He always does.” 

The only reason the bookshop had a phone, for instance, was because Crowley insisted. Always wanting a way to get in touch. One day Aziraphale had noticed it sitting there, and no matter how many troublesome people got hold of the number through demonic means (literally – he suspected Crowley handed it out when feeling peeved), he never once dreamed of vanishing it once more. 

Perhaps that’s precisely what will happen – perhaps even the same phone, that would be in keeping with Crowley’s style. More than once, he’s thought that has happened, only to realise that he simply imagined it.

Andy is watching him, biting at her lip. It smears the virulent lipstick, and distractedly he thinks that it looks much better. The colour really was wrong for her.

“What if – ” She takes a deep breath. “What if I said he was in trouble?”

Just like that, it’s as if the missiles are flying all over again. It’s the shock of acid rain, of tear gas. “What sort of trouble?”

“I don’t – ”

“Young lady.” He reaches out, catches himself, fights to stop breathing again because the world is going a little funny around him. “Andy. What sort of trouble?”

“I…can’t say exactly.” She flinches back from him and says quickly, “I told you it’s just flashes, it’s nothing that coherent. I just know that – that he’s in trouble and he needs you to go to him. Back to Earth.”

The words ring out, so surely she could have painted them in the air. 

“’Back to Earth’,” he echoes. Away from the archive. His collection. Away from the Fleet – the majority of humanity. 

“Yes.” She starts to scuff her boot against the floor before catching herself, standing up too straight with her hands on her hips. “I know you don’t want to, but if you just listen – ”

“Do you have a ship?”

She blinks. “Um. What?”

“A ship,” he repeats. “Do you have means of transportation or do you need me to find them?”

She frowns. “I – No, I have one in mind, but.” Tilting her head to the side, she says, “I thought, since you believe he wants you here, you wouldn’t want to…”

“I don’t have any way of contacting him. I have no way of being sure. And Crowley has a quite remarkable capacity for attracting trouble.” Generally from the only beings capable of destroying him. “Consider what you have seen of us, and ask yourself: would I choose to abandon him?”

Strangely, her expression turns more guilty than anything else. “No. You wouldn’t.”

“Then we have a journey to make.”

\---

_The ruins of Rome are still standing._

_Ancient Rome, not just Old Rome. The Eternal City endures in rubble the way it always has, and Crowley slithers over the Colosseum not because of the thousands of weeds trying to overtake it but for the reason why they haven't failed. The angel really is a sentimentalist, and a particularly ridiculous one at that. Why use a whole miracle to preserve what's already fallen? Of all the places in the world, why here?_

_There are a few like this. One Crowley won't go to, not alone._

_He used to taste all sorts of wonders here: pizza, pasta, oysters. Also blood, which was precisely why he avoided being a snake if he could help it. Frankly, Rome was always more of Aziraphale's thing than Crowley's, as much as that flies in the face of historical record. History is funny like that: at the time, the early fourteenth century seemed delightful. That makes remembering it all the worse._

__You didn't need to go so big, angel. Just keep Petronius’. The humans abandoned these ruins; let them go. __

_It would have been good, he thinks, if they'd learnt this amber trick earlier. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon would still be here; so would The Eden Project. But he wouldn't have used them, he knows that. Humans change. Every time humans have tried not to, it's never turned out well._

\---

“Oh, good Lord,” Aziraphale says. It only seems fair, given the sight of their…transport.

He hadn’t expected a grand battleship, of course. Nevertheless, as they descended in the lift and then proceeded further and further down the long line of hangars, he couldn’t help a sinking feeling. It has been a very long time since he explored, even longer since he particularly cared about the state of the smaller ships attached to the Fleet (the ones too small to fly the longer journey, the equivalent of lifeboats and fishing vessels, or perhaps remoras). That doesn’t mean he doesn’t recognise the signs of value declining into nothingness.

The doors open not with a sleek swoosh, but rather a distinct creak which makes him wonder how you oil a door ten times your height. On the other side sit ships – although ‘ships’ is far too generous a term. They sit there in squat uneven rows of patched up surfaces and bent metal. 

“That’s it,” Andy announces, pointing to the far end and a ship which aspires to represent the space equivalent of the Robin Reliant. Admittedly they’re standing at the opposite end of the hangar, but Aziraphale has no idea how you could ever expect it to fly. It looks triangular and square at the same time, jagged and curved – a sort of nightmare a plumber could dream up by hurling his toolkit into the ether. 

“It’s…” Aziraphale trails off for want of an phrase that doesn’t involve ‘horror’ or ‘monstrosity’ or ‘why’. “What’s her name?” he settles for, politely.

“ _Eurydice_.”

He looks at her sharply. “That isn’t funny.”

“Which is why I’m not joking about it.”

She can’t know. 

Unfortunately, she absolutely _can_. Presumably there must have been all manner of trends for naming, and they might well have included references to the exodus ships. He can’t imagine how you could grow up in the Fleet – even with her attitude towards schooling – and not know the name of the last ship to leave the Earth. The ship he had been on – and Crowley, at first. The same ship they’re standing in now – save for all the repairs and replacements, of course. You might as well say it was Theseus’.

“Keep it low and keep it quiet. The stuff in here’s marked for scrap, and while they won’t chase after us that far, they do take recycling seriously. I learnt to fly on that thing, it’s in the family, but we have to get onboard first.”

The proverbial penny drops. 

"I was under the impression that this was your ship."

Andy doesn’t look at him.

"Young lady – "

"You can stop calling me that whenever you want."

"If that isn't your vehicle, then surely we need to ask permission to – "

He stops. Andy is looking at him now, and it’s not a positive development in the slightest.

"Look, angel," she says, either oblivious to his wince or not caring, "we need a ship. That's a ship. Security's shit and I technically have a right to be on it. What, you wanted to steal something high-end?"

"I don't want to steal anything," he informs her. "It's a sin."

She raises an eyebrow. "Kind of like gluttony?"

"Yes, I've never heard that one before," he tells her, permitting himself to roll his eyes.

"Or lusting after a demon?"

"'Lust' is a base concept," he says, "and the fact that humans continue to equate it to love never ceases to be deeply concerning."

"Or tempting a chieftain to covet his neighbour's herd?" When Aziraphale does not instantly respond, she smirks. "Prophet, remember?"

"I'm still not convinced that's the appropriate term."

Andy makes a gesture with her hand that looks like she’s trying to pinch the air repeatedly, or perhaps catch it with prejudice. Her decidedly derogatory expression suggests that no, he isn’t imagining it, that ridiculous shadow-puppet performance has actually made a comeback. Of all the things in human existence. 

"I do not talk too much."

Andy stops, although her hand still hovers in the air. "No," she says slowly, "that means you're using really long words for no reason."

"No, it doesn't."

"Yes, it does."

"No, it – " Aziraphale purses his lips. "Oh dear. Is this like the two fingers business?"

To his moderate relief, whilst Andy does open her mouth to respond, she promptly closes it again, her general demeanour shifting from insulting sarcasm to someone trying not to be sick. He waits politely.

"Angel."

"Aziraphale," he corrects.

"Just – don't say that again. _Ever_."

"Honestly, young lady, the sooner we never speak again, the better."

"Sooner I never have to dream about you again, more like."

Mercifully, rather than forcing Aziraphale to formulate a response to _that_ , Andy moves forward, from shadow to shadow (of which there are plenty, lighting repairs seems less of a priority here) and from the wall's corner to the nearest ship. Aziraphale looks around, considering simply retreating and forgetting the whole thing and just going back to his archive. There has to be some more legal solution (in the celestial sense), or at least one that doesn’t involve binding himself to this child.

Not for the first time, the slightest thought makes his mind catch. The slightest question and _Do I look like I know what I'm doing, angel?_

"Angel!"

Aziraphale starts – possibly jumps, if he cares to admit it.

Only one person – one entity – has the right to hiss at him like that. As the disappointment hits him, so the reservations die away. 

No guards in this scuffed and downtrodden hangar. Aziraphale doesn’t even try to find the cameras around the room. Instead he brings his hand down, and thinks about how they shouldn't work at all.

When he strides past Andy, she makes a grab for him. "Angel, they'll see you!"

"Hardly," he sniffs. "And I would very much appreciate it if you would call me by my name, young lady."

Slowly she straightens up, pulling at her trousers to smooth out the creases. Her eyes are still a little wide, flicking to the corners of the room. Then they widen further. "Are those smoking?"

Aziraphale glances over his shoulder. Sure enough, in the far corner a faint trail of smoke is winding its way towards the vast ceiling. There’s another nearby, and several more observable without so much as moving his head. "Ah," he says. "Yes," he continues, much more firmly.

"Did you do that?"

"As you seem to enjoy reminding me, I am an angel, after all."

For the very briefest of moments, he can almost imagine that she looks impressed. At the very least she seems to be smiling, and not in the way that tends to accompany an insult. Aziraphale might prefer to believe that he doesn’t have an ego – psychology is a human invention, he'd read Freud and decided that that was quite enough of that – but he can’t deny that he likes someone appreciating his efforts.

Then that smile vanishes and she says, "You're an idiot." She doesn’t sound impressed, or awed; she sounds somewhere on the disputed border between surprise and panic.

"I beg your pardon?"

She grabs his hand and runs for the ship.

Aziraphale has never once cared for running. (Neither has Crowley, although that could well have been more a matter of physics given his hips have several minds of their own.) At most he can manage the brisk walk of someone determined to have a word with those attempting to avoid him. Given the choice, he'd even avoid flying.

Still, call it the rush of a positive decision or blowing the dust off of his literally-God-given powers; blame the spark of realising he might not have to live this eternal life alone; attribute it to the alarms that starting to blare and the red lights filling the room. Whatever the reason, for once, he runs.

The ramp of the ship lowers as the two of them career across the hangar, unhinging from the _Eurydice_ ’s ungainly belly. As miracles go, that barely counts, and the same is true of how the ramp then promptly rises up again with them barely inside.

"Do I need to fly this contraption as well?" he demands.

"Don't you fucking dare," Andy says, pelting down the corridor and leaving a trail of ancestral curses in her wake.

The ship is even less to look at on the inside, or rather it _has_ nothing much to look at. The ramp feeds into a fairly bland room which Aziraphale presumes to be the airlock for no other reason than that he is fairly certain 'spaceship' and 'airlock' are terms rarely seen far apart. Said room then spits occupants out onto a stretch which one might term a corridor. The first room contains the sort of detritus he knows all too well accumulates in the presence of storage, the one next door has the sort of miniscule bedroom which once would have cost a small fortune in Old Soho. Calling the third a kitchen is a genuine insult. Inside the fourth lies something large and extremely complicated-looking, which lights up and begins to hiss and whine as he watches. He takes this as his cue and flees to the cockpit.

Andy is flicking switches on the console seemingly at random, still swearing and beginning to repeat herself. Aziraphale hovers in the doorway. 

"Having trouble?"

"Wouldn't you like that," she says through clenched teeth. With the kind of yell that fells wild beasts, she wrenches one handle to the side and accompanies this with a stomp of her boot against the console. The highbacked pilot’s chair tips back, the offending metal rings, and the whine levels out into the growl of a cat with an upset stomach. "Just some fine handling," Andy pronounces and reaches for the main controls (which to Aziraphale still resembles a steering wheel no matter what else humans call it). "Take a seat, angel."

"Aziraphale," he reminds her, already most of the way into the passenger chair. He drove enough with Crowley in the past to recognise the fear surging up inside him. It’s greatly unfortunate that the roof is too far away to brace himself against, but then again, his hands are already curled white-knuckled around the seat. He can _feel_ the ground dropping away beneath them, the way that the slightest movement from Andy could send them spinning into anything nearby at speeds to which no human should ever have access. The walls shake and it unhelpfully occurs to him that after the first apocalypse he’s never tested what would actually happen if he were to be discorporated. Suddenly this seems a terrible oversight.

_Where’s your sense of adventure, angel?_

Andy shoots him a smile – the kind that sparks with the thrill of terrible decisions and the amoral cocktail that is human adrenaline. "Sure thing, Zira."

It isn’t that Aziraphale doesn’t trust her to have a plan to open the hangar doors, or the outer gates beyond those. He just…decides to help.

\---

_It didn't take much, in the end. Crowley was right, and as usual it was only when he didn’t really want to be. Not about the rockets – he was very happy about not having to spark off a whole space project_ again _– but about it being kept so very hush-hush. Once he went chasing the leads, brushed off all those film noirs and absolutely leant into your demonic powers of persuasion, he found the rich people all talking away. He found the private funding. The successful trials kept out of the media for the exact reason Crowley wanted them: keep your voice down or they'll all want one._

_"You're not serious," Aziraphale said, as if he hadn’t spent the same amount of time on this planet as Crowley. As if he didn’t have just as much reason to feel that cynicism that makes its home so easily inside him, as much as both of them have trouble with that. Crowley was disappointed too, to be uncharacteristically honest with himself. He hated that that kept happening._

_"Yup," he said, popping the p as if enough ostentatiousness would make this any better. "All getting ready to fly the old coop. Got the money to kill the planet so why stick around?"_

_The glint in Aziraphale's eye made it hard not to grin. Crowley loved him, the absolute bastard._

_Nobody could say how it all leaked out: a word here, a picture there, and (in a usual burst of Crowleyan desperate inspiration) an influencer sent the wrong invite and too caught up in the thrill of being first to realise they’d let the cat out of the bag. Didn’t matter, never does. The point was to get the story out there, and people were pissed._

_"How do you even have contacts?" Crowley asked. There was a riot building in Parliament Square, he could taste it. "The last time you cared about news, it was the printing press."_

_"Which remains one of the greatest inventions humans have ever devised."_

_"Didn't Upstairs hate it?"_

_Aziraphale pursed his lips. "Well. There's no accounting for taste."_

_It turned out that while Crowley retained a hotline to the tabloid press (which mostly consisted of business cards to hand out to demons), Aziraphale had somehow cultivated quite the following of inspirational online journalists. Something about inspiring them whenever they came into his shop. Crowley didn’t quite follow it but he suspected that was Aziraphale's own way of helping after the first attempt at ending the world. Presumably the divinely inspired didn’t care about the book they’d been eyeing up._

_Once the story blew up online, the dominos kept on falling. Big confrontations, lots of bribes, lots of miracles. Maybe Crowley would have stepped back a little, just to check, but Aziraphale was all-in on this one and he could be quite the force of nature (as it were). Crowley didn’t blame all those activists for getting fired up by him. Times like this, you could see the warrior Heaven had in mind, even if it was still Aziraphale so sometimes it slipped into watching a righteous sofa of vengeance._

_"What is it?" Aziraphale asked, as the United Nations passed a resolution to launch the public spaceships. They would be underfunded and crowded and awful, but what mattered was that nobody would get left behind. Not this time._

_"Nothing," Crowley lied, topping up his glass after the toast._

_"_ Crowley _."_

_Crowley smiled as he took a sip. "Just like seeing you like this, angel."_

_Maybe Aziraphale didn’t know where Crowley was really focusing his energies; about the meetings with plenty of rich important men and occasionally rich important women, in boardrooms or bars. The – for want of a better word –_ shmooozing _. A couple he managed to tip towards charity, calling in all that experience from handling Aziraphale's blessings; the rest he guilted or shamed or did whatever it took to get even a fraction of that wealth flowing towards something greater than personal survival. It took a lot of thinking on his feet but he was more than used to that._

_He stopped short of the political sector, though. You only had to set foot in Washington or London or Beijing to smell the demons gathering, the alkaline sting of angels. The wars were still building, humanity so keen to be told where to point fingers. There would be a lot of humans who didn’t make it because they’d already be dead. Crowley just hoped they wouldn’t start dropping bombs just yet._

_The ships were taking off, one two three, off into the stars without looking back. The rich, the powerful; the ones responsible. The poor giving all they had for the privilege of being the slave class. It was all too easy to see how it would go; how the old pattern would keep on repeating itself. Crowley didn’t blame them in the slightest, the ones settling for less. How could he? Hope for a better tomorrow or take the chance offered now. He might have been a hypocrite but even he had his limits._

_“Someone will have to go with them, you know,” Crowley said, as they both stood watching the live feed in Trafalgar Square as the clouds overhead seemed too low and too strangely coloured to bode anything good. “Look after them.”_

_“Do you think so?”_

_“Nothing major, obviously.” Crowley sniffed. “None of that handholding or anything. Just…present. Make sure it doesn’t all go tits-up the moment we look away.”_

_Aziraphale lit up at ‘we’. Crowley thanked Someone he still wore glasses._

\---

Most of the advances in space travel shortly before the exodus of humanity from Earth had focused on the daily necessities: the best means of maintaining oxygen, water, food, that sort of thing. ( _"It's like plants,"_ Crowley had said. _"Only in this case when you forget to water it because Corrie's on, you end up in court."_ He had paused. _"Space court."_ ) The smoothness of travel had been deemed a secondary concern, once everyone stopped throwing up. The larger ships and space stations had ways of generating their own fields to distract you from the void beyond, which were about as effective as any means of human commercial travel in that regard (although Aziraphale had never had the chance to witness Crowley's whiskey ending up in his lap in space). Once the great voyage was underway, there had been all manner of advances in smaller vessels – or rather that was what Aziraphale had assumed, based on humanity's general interest in not constantly making itself ill. After all, the horses might have been a very long phase, but they had been a phase nevertheless.

Aziraphale reflects on all of this in an attempt to distract himself from his current mode of transportation. It...rattles.

"Told you they'd give up fast," Andy says, squatting down to peer closely at a set of lights on the enormous contraption Aziraphale has designated 'the engine'. (Andy uses a rather more elaborate name, complete with nonsensical acronym. She had not appreciated Aziraphale informing her of Crowley’s responsibility for popularising those.) "Theft's frowned upon but who gives a fuck about these old things? 'Sides, nowhere else to go. Universe has its limits."

Aziraphale closes his eyes tightly and pinches the bridge of his nose. He isn’t what any angel would have called an expert on celestial mechanics ( _just leave it to me_ ) but some things he still understands well enough to cause him the angelic equivalent of a migraine.

Andy prods at a few switches, punctuating the movements with a noise of general disgust, and bangs her hand against the nearest expanse of metal until the distant rattling noise turns into a hum at just the right note to set Aziraphale's teeth on edge. He flinches with every impact. "Is that strictly necessary?"

"It works."

"Look, I might be immortal but you are not, so this seems rather risky behaviour for you to engage in."

"You're technically not immortal though, are you? What's the thing you've always said: 'inconveniently discorporated'?" She turns enough to bare a smile at him. "Although I guess they're not handed out the paperwork so readily these days?"

"That isn't funny in the slightest," he says. 

Slipping to the other side of the engine and under, Andy starts wielding what Aziraphale presumes to be some form of space spanner with far too much carelessness. "Five minutes and we can start hopping."

"Pardon?"

Her head pops out again – not from the end of the engine Aziraphale expects – and she looks at him as if she might be impressed. Certainly he can detect a surprising note of wonder in the air, without anyone else around to blame it on. "How have you been in the Fleet this long without knowing what hopping is?"

"Perhaps I misheard you." He had not. "I presume it pertains to...speed?"

She nods, so slowly he fancies that it must hurt. "We can't teleport but we can skip ahead. And actually, I was hoping you'd help with that."

_Careful, angel. Wouldn’t want you to go too fast._

The spaceship vibrates around him at a frequency which brought to mind one of Mozart's more chaotic operas. Aziraphale hasn’t always cared for Mozart, and does not appreciate the experience at all. (He had enjoyed _The Magic Flute_ , which Crowley found rather funny for some reason.) "I can't possibly imagine how I would be able to assist you with this...contraption."

As always, he pointedly ignores the way Andy imitated his pronunciation in his answer. It’s rather unfair, having so many echoes in one person's behaviour, and especially when said person is currently your only companion in the depths of space. (Not that space has depths. At least, Aziraphale didn't think so.) _Obviously_ is hardly a memory he enjoys revisiting.

"Here's our problem," Andy announces. Somehow Aziraphale doubts it would be any of the problems currently occupying the lengthy scroll in his mind. "We can hop, but it's small jumps only and we have a lot of space to roll past. The whole length of modern history, in fact. Which, you might have noticed, took a while."

"Much longer than you could survive."

That hardly seems something to smile about, yet it’s not as if Andy makes any more sense to him than your average female-identifying teenager in any time period. "Exactly. And before you start fantasising about just waiting me out until I die," Aziraphale lets out a disgruntled noise of offence, "I'm the one who knows how to fly this ship. Now, I know space is pretty big even for you, but I figured you could make us...go faster."

Stifling his instinctive ‘good Lord’, Aziraphale says, "That seems inadvisable."

She rolls her eyes. "Your boyfriend did it all the time, and that was with gravity around."

'Boyfriend'. Rather inconveniently, for a moment Aziraphale finds himself back on Earth – the old Earth, before the first apocalypse hadn't happened – with Uriel staring him down. He blinks rather quickly to try to dismiss her, and refuses to turn his head to see if Michael is there too.

"Zira?"

He clears his throat, brushing himself down as if you could shift memories as easily as dust. "I should remind you that I understand extremely little about space travel. That was always – " He stops short.

For once, Andy does not jump in with a comment. The arrangement of her facial features isn’t one he recognises on her, but another human would look sad.

Crowley was supposed to handle all this. Space is his realm, the one he'd really been exiled from. Filling in the gaps without him hadn't seemed right, and besides, there’s the entirety of human culture to preserve in one way or another. His books, in whose pages time stopped bothering him and so did the hollow to the left of him. Inside of him.

Crowley’s the one who belongs out here. In the uncharted worlds. Aziraphale’s supposed to look after the maps.

_Someone has to know where the dragons are._

Without another word, he turns and leaves the room. Nowhere to roam, on foot at least, so he finds himself back in the cockpit gazing out at the stars. With humanity constantly on the move, you don’t get the same stories anymore. The few they have, Aziraphale records quite happily – still humans finding patterns in the air. Only it’s like the world: moving too fast to really appreciate them. Signposts in the sky rather than named individuals. There are the official starnamers, he supposes, and he had been rather spoilt with the rich variety of stories on Earth.

He can’t say when Andy appears next to him. He only appreciates that she stands to his right.

"Would it help if I said that I know you can do it?"

Aziraphale sighs. "Perhaps. I don't have a lot of imagination, I'm afraid. Not the kind for this sort of thing."

Andy rocks a little on her feet, another one of her small tells of youth. "I do know what relativity is, Zira. You imagined different to Heaven; you don't have to be the best."

Aziraphale feels his lips curl into a smile, tucked away and small yet still there. "Sometimes, young lady, you're capable of surprising levels of sentiment."

"Why don't you just call me 'nice' and get it over with?"

"I wouldn't dream of it." _Nice is a four-letter word._ "He is the best, you know."

"I know he thinks he's very good," she says. "Sometimes. He's more consistent when it comes to being absolutely ridiculous about you."

It's not the same, sensing love when it's just your own. Not the same glow; not the same flickering flame to send you to sleep in warm arms. Nevertheless, despite everything, Aziraphale is an angel, and he presses his hand to his chest.

"What precisely do I have to do so that this actually works?"

"There we go," she says with a grin. "We need another five minutes to charge up – this ship wasn't exactly built assuming people would go that far. You tell it to go faster; when I hit the button, we stop. Easy enough."

"Some might say too easy."

“Well. There’s the waiting, I suppose.” She twiddles her thumbs, not metaphorically but literally, and thus rather charmingly. “So, tell me a story.”

“I beg your pardon?” Crowley often spoke of ‘mood whiplash’, mostly as a supposedly smooth explanation for his poor responses to words of affection. Aziraphale believes the excuse as much as any other one and always politely remained silent.

“To pass the time. That’s what people do, right? In your whole ideal dream of humanity?” Before Aziraphale can assert quite categorically how wrong this accusation is, she says, “Tell me what happened. The last time.”

Feigning ignorance does cross Aziraphale’s mind – anything to avoid this, since there really is only one ‘time’ she could mean by that. One thing that she might care about hearing from him. "I would have thought your _visions_ might have told you."

"Doesn't mean I don't want to hear it in your words." She sits down again in the pilot’s seat, resting one boot against the console. "We've got a couple of minutes for the girl to charge up, so: tell me a story, Zira."

"I don't suppose it matters to you that I might not enjoy revisiting the occasion."

"Life hurts. I bet that's true for you too."

"I was there when that started." Not that that's strictly true. For humans, perhaps, with that slight overreaction to the apple consumption, but angels knew what pain was before that. Some more than others. ( _Stop thinking about me shirtless, angel._ ) 

Andy just sits and watches him.

"You could always give me a prompt. Somewhere to start."

She smirks. "Have a trouble with beginnings?"

"Most struggle with that. Or endings." ( _Like it's my fault the gloomy ones always end shit._ ) 

"Okay then." She purses her lips. "How about 'once upon a time, me and my boyfriend were supposed to leave together'."

"'And I'."

"What?"

"'My boyfriend and I', that would be the correct sentence structure."

She flexes her fingers, before folding her arms behind her head. "Still your boyfriend."

"It's rather too light a word for me, I'm afraid." He clears his throat to interrupt any attempts at further comment. "Well then: 'once upon a time', if you like, we were on the last ship to leave Earth."

"Both of you?"

"If you already know it, why do you want to hear it?"

"I know what I see in dreams. It isn't the same as being there and it isn't the same as what each person sees. Trust me, I've seen _so many_ of your misunderstandings, the two of you. Perspective matters."

Aziraphale's neck feels a little hot. Discussing the extensive historical and literary debates concerning concepts such as the unreliable narrator, whilst extremely tempting, would presumably fail to receive a favourable audience. Which is to say that, unlike Crowley, Andy seems far harder to distract for long. 

He closes his eyes. It isn't that he wants to see it all over again, so much as he doesn't want to see anything else. "It was called the _Orpheus_ back then – I'm not sure why. I know the significance of course – I met the poor gentleman – but I don't know who chose the name. Nobody talked about it.

"We were both there, with the stragglers, the ones resigned to staying behind. Crowley – he didn't like that, at all. The last few months on Earth, I didn't see as much of him as you might expect. He was so determined that everyone should leave – that everyone should have a chance." He swallows. That had stung – not Crowley's constant kindness, never that, but that Crowley had seemed so disinclined to share the experience. There were so many places Aziraphale would have liked to see one last time, with him. Oh, they had their short bursts, Crowley suddenly everywhere once again and cajoling him into walks in all manner of countries and continents. Never enough, naturally, because you simply couldn't have 'enough' of Crowley.

He's gone silent. He realises it as Andy reaches out, mouth twisting a little and hand hovering awkwardly in midair. Settling back in the chair, he says, "Yes, well. You've presumably heard some version of the story, not that many care about it now. 'The Last to Leave', or 'The Stragglers' if you're so politically inclined."

"I'm really not."

Obviously. She isn't in charge. "So, we set off for the stars. We watched the planets go by – never the Earth, though. Always focusing our attention forwards." He's stalling. He's stalling and he knows it and as much as he usually talks so easily, without thinking about it, he's never told this story. He's never been a storyteller at all, yet this is much worse than that.

His hands squeeze at his knees. His bowtie is too tight. He wants to touch his pocket square but he's too scared that it might not be there.

Softly, Andy asks, "When did he go, then? If he was there on the ship...?"

"I only looked away for a moment," Aziraphale says. He gazes without seeing at his hands, now lying open and useless. "I didn't say – "

There's a great deal he didn't say. Couldn't say. Had no way of spotting a last chance approaching.

"He vanished?"

Aziraphale had felt that wonderful presence simply wink out. Suddenly so much further away – several planets, back home, _Earth_. And then came the rush, the fire in the engines. Speeding into the unknown. And as much as he tried to reach back, everything closed off behind him. A barrier human eyes couldn’t see, miraculous glue holding it shut.

"He said that he hoped the humans would survive – thrive. I suppose that his way of saying goodbye." He tips himself back in the chair, only flinching a little when it goes back further than expected. It’s an old habit, the oldest, really: looking upwards for answers. Crowley told him once that there was no up or down in space, yet another thing Aziraphale didn't understand.

"Why?"

"Why hope that you survived?"

"Why leave?"

And that’s the crux of the problem, isn’t it? All he has are theories. The thoughts preying on Crowley's mind in the last days, and the miracle he left in his wake.

"No more angels," he says. "Or demons, for that matter. Even when the humans were killing the planet, both of our old sides were still there, still invested in fighting each other. One of the reasons the fallen rebelled was because they thought humans shouldn't have been given the Earth – too much responsibility, not enough to show for it, 'privileged' and so on. They've always been invested in the Earth, or it ending, and I suppose – I suppose he wanted to make sure neither would win."

"You don't sound like you believe it."

"I do," he says, firmer than intended. Perhaps because it sounds too much like he might not believe in _Crowley_. "And he was right, of course. And it does make sense – one of us with the humans, one of us with the Earth. Making sure all goes to plan."

"Whose plan?"

He laughs a little, not quite embarrassed but caught nonetheless. "Nobody's plan, I suppose. That's the idea. Strictly for humans only."

"Sounds like it hurt."

The smile fades easily. "I wouldn't say that."

"Because you're an angel?"

Turning in his seat a little to look at her, he asks. "What does that have to do with it?"

"Well, if I've noticed one thing, it's that angels? Not big on talking about your feelings. Kind of ironic really," Andy goes on, a hint of a smirk appearing and disappearing just as fast, "all that 'love one another' stuff. Better at telling other people, aren't you?"

Aziraphale exhales, not a great deal in itself except for how breathing remains optional for him. Possibly he frowns as well, just a little. Nothing major. "I'll have you know I've never engaged much in that line of business."

"So you're shit at that too."

" _Young lady_ – "

"Look." She pivots to face him bodily, only one hand left resting on the controls, and he instinctively grabs at both seat and console as if that will save him. "You love him – _love_ , not loved, and none of that ethereal stuff. Only you're out here and he's back there and you don't even know why."

"I just told you why," Aziraphale says, clipped as a Victorian soiree.

"No, you didn’t."

This time Aziraphale inhales, deeply. "I realise you have access to memories that most of humanity do not, but that doesn't mean that you know _everything_." Before, he might have added a young lady' there, or even something more evidently affectionate, the way some conversations still bring out a little Polari from nostalgia or a lack of it. 

Andy shrugs. "Alright then. Why? Why carry on with the Fleet?"

"Well, that's perfectly simple." Aziraphale straightens his cuffs and then lays his hands primly in his lap. "He wants me to."

He smiles benignly at nothing in particular, or alternatively the vast vacuum of space.

Andy clicks her tongue, one of those affectations of youth, he presumes. "You know that's not an explanation, right?"

"Of course it is."

"Why though?"

"Because he wants me to look after humanity." He raised his eyebrows at her. "Including you, I'm afraid to say," he added drily.

"And you do a lot of that?"

"That's hardly the point. I'm...present."

"Well," Andy mutters to herself, "I guess that gives you points over some of the other options." Then she points at him. "Okay, so why you?"

"He trusted me – _trusts_ me." He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment. "Trusts."

Without conscious thought, his fingers find their way to that silken pocket square. You can't see red without looking, not even when you're an angel, but it was always about more than the colour. Crowley – his Crowley – changes so constantly because it isn’t the appearance that really matters. He was – is – a constant, Aziraphale's constant, a star built on that trust. That _faith_ , as much as he'd spit the word in Aziraphale's face more times than he can number.

Funny, how Crowley had taken to throwing out the word 'love' in the end, so casually. For his own part and to his shame, Aziraphale had struggled with saying 'love' and meaning something so personal, so individual. Giving a name to the expanse inside him which only gravitated to Crowley. A flaw in his nature, he'd always assumed, not unlike the miniscule spots on Crowley's plants which would bring down his wrath. Apparently Crowley only ever needed the space to say it, enough that the first time Aziraphale might have noticed the word but he didn't understand the meaning.

But the trust. 'I trust you'. That had been harder. And that’s why Aziraphale knew it would stay the same.

He's staring out of the vacscreen again (an old colloquialism for the front window which dates back to the early days of the Fleet). The way he does so easily when his thoughts turn this way.

Quietly, Andy asks, "You trust him back?"

He considers retorting with 'why wouldn't I?' It's obvious, and that's exactly what Crowley would say. _Don't make a big thing of it, angel,_ as he wriggled down into the sofa or downed the closest drink to hand. When looked at a certain way, Crowley positively shimmers with love, and whenever he did that you could see him trying to shake it free. Trying to rub it away on the cushions.

Aziraphale says, "Of course."

Andy looks at him – really looks at him, which never stops being disconcerting from a teenager no matter what century you're in. He stops himself shifting in his seat through force of will.

Eventually she just says, "Must be nice."

As if ordained, something pings into the silence, as a range of lights on the console. “Right then,” Andy says, taking hold of a lever full of ominous promise. "Let's go get your husband."

And the stars streak away.

\---

_Acid rain couldn’t penetrate an angel wing. So there was that._

_"I never thought it would get this bad," Aziraphale said, looking up at the sky. It was convoluted, trying to fit their wings together so that they overlapped, but Crowley didn’t just have imagination, he had stubbornness too, in spades. In spades of spades._

_"'Spade' is a dumb word," he muttered._

_The hand-squeezing was still a thing. Very much a thing. The sort of thing that still made Crowley look down in surprise, as if he somehow wasn’t constantly aware of Aziraphale so close, not so much within touching distance as_ being _touching distance._

_"Focus, dear."_

_"I'd rather not." Unlike Aziraphale, he looked up not at the Heavens but at the great white wing tucked above him, warm and elegant with just enough shadow not to lead to some rather unfortunate memories. Until he started thinking about them. Bugger. "Look, so we thought the heat death or the polar winter or the lack of bees were going to get to them first. Wouldn't surprise me if my lot were off somewhere pumping whatever they needed into the air to get this one. Lot of drama in rain burning the flesh. Very...apocalyptic-y." He sounded out every syllable, even the invented one._

_Aziraphale was a little too quiet. When fussing, Aziraphale filled the air with his sound and fury (so to speak), so it was only reasonable for Crowley to already feel his nerves ramping up._

_"They aren't 'your lot', Crowley."_

_Crowley swallowed and affected an air of innocence, or at the very least ignorance. "What?"_

_"Hell. Demons._ Them _." Aziraphale helpfully jabbed a finger downwards. "They aren't 'your lot', any more than Heaven is mine. Our own side, remember? I never expected you to forget that."_

_Crowley wasn't certain whether that was intended as an accusation or a lamentation. Given that he loathed both, he wasn’t not particularly interested in looking at the question for too long (which of course meant that he would spend weeks playing this all back in his head). "Sure, angel. Didn't forget. Just – " He twitched. "You know how it is. Sometimes names make things feel...closer."_

_Too close. The rain was Hell’s, no question of that. To have it strong enough to penetrate like this. The humans started it, but they’d already moved on. Lots of ways to ruin the Earth, it seemed like._

_"Thing is, when you think about it, what exactly has 'our side' accomplished?"_

_Aziraphale looked at him, away, back again. Overhead, his feathers rustled. "I can't say that I understand your point, dear."_

_"Sure, sure." Crowley didn’t blame him. He didn’t want to understand it either. "Just – Right, we cheat the bosses and we swan off into the sunset, and we get a good run what with Adam deciding to fix the place, only then he goes and dies like a mortal idiot and what do we do? World's still burning, angel – or drowning, or whatever." He frowned. "What do you think Upstairs is doing? Think they're on the ice caps with a blowtorch?"_

_"Really, Crowley!"_

_"No, not their style. What was it you said, from before – the nuclear war? That was their method? Guess that explains the politics."_

_"_ Crowley _!"_

_The thing was – the thing that truly made Aziraphale the real deal, the only actual angel in existence – even when he looked absolutely furious he never moved his wing so much as an inch. He sheltered Crowley even when Crowley wasn’t worth it. When Crowley’d had all this, lifetimes of an angel's undivided love in every aspect, and yet here he was, still himself. Still asking questions._

_"Whatever has gotten into you today?"_

_'Sorry' still struggled to escape his tongue. Instead, he shrugged. "End of the world gets me down, maybe."_

_"It's not going to be the end of the world."_

_"End of this one." Crowley waved a hand in front of them, encompassing the whole view from the top of the Shard. (Still expensive exclusive rooms for the human more interested in winning at Monopoly than saving anyone else. If you sat on top, you don't have to look at it.) "And the changes they're making? Sure, you've got the rain and the war but whatever else happens, it's not the same planet anymore. You're an angel, you can tell when something's dying."_

_"It isn't dying," Aziraphale insisted. "It's just changing."_

_"Yeah, not into anything good." Crowley sat back on his hands. "Is it just me or is rain never a good sign? The Garden, Noah – maybe this isn't the old crew, maybe it's Her trying to hurry it along."_

_He wasn’t expecting Aziraphale to grab his shoulder, or to pull him around so that he had no choice but to look into those unfairly blue eyes. "We will find a way, Crowley," Aziraphale said, and, bless him, he sounded like he really believed it. "It's as you said: 'all of us against all of them'. Humanity will survive this."_

_"Not so sure the Earth will," Crowley murmured._

_"Humanity is more than the Earth," Aziraphale said, and Crowley couldn’t help performatively blinking a few times at that._

_"Bit of a change of sentiment for you, isn't it?"_

_"It's – Oh, give me a moment." Aziraphale frowned, and Crowley traced the line it made in his head as sure as a signature. He'd smooth it out, only when thinking the angel was off-limits. Familiar, that. "This isn't the same species God created – not anymore. And what matters are the connections, the feelings. It's – "_

_His head suddenly snapped up, staring up at the sky. "Crowley, what were you saying a while ago? About the 'rock-it's?"_

_"One word," Crowley corrected automatically, "'Rockets'. Also, what?" Aziraphale hadn't even cared about the space race when there had been some very real mortal and immortal consequences. Somewhere in their accumulated junk there was probably still the scraps of paper Crowley had used to try to illustrate it._

_"Well, Heaven and Hell, they're concerned about the Earth, aren't they? But the humans could just leave, couldn't they?"_

_"You want...to _give_ Earth to them."_

_"No, no," Aziraphale shook his head so hard it was a wonder it didn’t go flying off, "obviously not. But, well, shouldn't we try to save them?"_

_"Without the planet."_

_"I'm saying, Crowley, that perhaps we can take advantage? Play – oh, what's the phrase – play 'the long game'?"_

_Crowley wished he had a drink. Or fifty. "Is this me being a terrible influence on you?"_

_"Or a good one," Aziraphale said. For fuck's sake, Crowley could_ see _the enthusiasm rising off him. The angel just couldn’t contain it. Any other time, Crowley would be taking advantage of their current set-up to wriggle in close, even shift shape to get even closer, and just bathe in all of it. It hardly seemed fair, the way there was something settling deep in his stomach, cold and hard and poisonous._

_"It still sounds like abandoning, angel."_

_"We're not going to abandon anyone, dear." Oh._ Shit _. Aziraphale had his hands cupping Crowley's face now, that smile so close, and Crowley might have been dying or he might have just wished that were the case. "We're going to save people. Everyone – Not just the rich, or the chosen._ Everyone _."_

_Crowley's mouth was so very dry. "Sounds like an awful lot of work, angel. What are you going to do, miracle up a space-Ark?"_

_"We'll think of something," Aziraphale said, with the kind of confidence he really shouldn't have after Heaven had disappointed him so thoroughly. Sinner that he was, Crowley envied it so. "They must already be thinking about solutions, mustn't they? We just push them how we want – just like the old days, only together!"_

_"Last time we tried that, we spent eleven years raising the wrong Antichrist."_

_"Who grew into an excellent comedienne, you might recall."_

_"Talking about us."_

_"Crowley." Well, fuck him. There was nothing else he could think about with Aziraphale so near to hand, goodness filling Crowley up to the tips of his corporation. Like his heart was expanding; like he might have had Grace again._ Hardly sporting, angel. _"We will save them. Together."_

_Crowley tried to arrange his mouth into a smile. Maybe they could. Maybe something good actually could happen._

_"Sure. Whatever you say, angel."_

_The kissing was unnecessary. He'd already said yes._

_That didn’t mean he wouldn’t take it all._

\---

They emerge from the slippery slide of space with the kind of judder and moan less evocative of space travel than throwing a plate against the wall.

"Hand slipped," Andy says, removing the offending limb from the lever, and Aziraphale might be an angel repeatedly accused of gullibility (not actually a sin, that would create quite the contradiction), but remains more than capable of sensing a lie. In fact, there's nothing supernatural about it: her hands had already been tightening on the controls and she’d developed a vast fascination with the blinking light which even he suspects does absolutely nothing other than exist as a blinking light.

He sighs. "How long will it take to …’hop’ again?"

"Depends on the girl's mood. Can't you miracle it? Just one galaxy away."

Humans have this continuing tendency to view vast sums as perfectly reasonable. Rarely has Aziraphale felt quite so irked by it. "One galaxy is hardly nothing."

"You guys made the place. Must have had some sort of shortcut."

"What we did not have is Time, in the very nice and accurate sense. Things occurred, and there was no way of measuring it because there was nothing to measure." Also, Azirapahale hadn't been present for that part. "Besides, I can't. "

"Can't what?"

"'Miracle it’." Aziraphale had learnt to use quotation marks before humans had even invented the necessary grammar in the first place. Crowley necessitated adaptations like that, at least when he was supposed to be a good obedient angel, and they had stuck around even when he'd become a rather bad angel. "One of Crowley's lines of defence against the forces of Heaven and Hell."

She drums her fingers worryingly close to some important-looking buttons. "He can do that?"

"He certainly could." Not that Aziraphale ever truly tested it. Belief had seemed half the point. As an angel, that had offered some reassurance.

"Can you?"

"Hardly."

She lets out a low and somehow sarcastic whistle. "I got the useless one?"

Wrath remained a sin throughout the millennia, and never one Aziraphale had relished for the simple reason that he had often suspected that it would end up much like gluttony for him. Because of this, he gives her a very severe glare he had been taught by a matriarch in eighteenth-century Bath, and when she fails to melt away, he focused his attention firmly at the outside display.

His stomach twists most unpleasantly as the reality prodding at him finally becomes impossible to ignore. 

There’s a vast space station orbiting patiently in front of them, rotating its ring shape like some sort of cosmic frisbee. The accumulation of small ships like flies indicates that it remains very much inhabited – remarkably so for this far back along the trail. Miners and couriers, Aziraphale surmises, after which his knowledge of plausible standard spacefaring occupations dries up into nothingness. It’s nowhere near the concentration of the Fleet, yet it must still represent one of the only other gathering places for humanity of similar size. It’s certainly more than doubled in size since he last saw it, on the outbound journey.

That’s not what’s causing him to cringe a little from the view though. It’s the bright stars in the distance – the kind of stars a human would call a sun now as their horizons literally expand. A binary star system, he recalls.

“Alpha Centauri,” and it isn’t so much spoken as felt, remembered, mourned.

"Ever been here?" Andy asks.

"It never felt quite right," he murmurs. "He offered to take me – fairly begged at one point. It just became...one of those things." The trip to Blackpool if you saved enough. The tour of Europe. Earthrise on the Moon.

The first humans to split from the Fleet had settled here. Courage and impatience bred gambling and excess, the wild west with room to sprawl. You find it everywhere. And it was hardly a surprise when he looked at it with angel eyes, to see who else had settled here. The spots of celestial light and infernal darkness. The other sides.

Andy taps at the side of the console. “We need to dock.”

Aziraphale jerks away from her. “Why on Earth would we do that?”

“We need help.” 

“’Help’,” he echoes. The _Eurydice_ has never stopped making strangled screaming sounds every five minutes since they underwent the journey, and that has certainly been concerning to the extreme and the precise opposite of what Aziraphale would prefer from any vehicle in which he travels, yet he cannot detect any change in its tortured moans. Definitely nothing which would warrant Andy actually caring.

“Last leg of the journey,” she says, too casual. “Besides, might as well stretch our legs. I’ve never been to a space station before.”

_Sometimes,_ Crowley whispers, _it’s like humans just want to die._

“You’re aware of the…company?”

“Then you’d better keep me safe, hadn’t you?”

\---

_Australia's only possible now that he knows Dagon isn't lurking in the waters. All the same, he swims fast, because neither being a snake nor a demon helps in Earth's oceans. Trying to calculate your place in the foodchain is very much like outer space, only with life ready to swallow you whole instead of collapsed starstuff. The seas were never his bag, even though he was there when they covered everything – 'there' in the temporal sense, obviously. Maybe Dagon felt the same way about the oceans as he does about the stars, although it’s never a great idea to go speculating as to whether anybody feels like him._

_Aziraphale wasn't there. For any of it. Warborn angel, hysterically enough (in every sense)._

_Now Aziraphale's off in the stars and so is Dagon (or in another planet's methane seas), and here's Crowley slithering onto shores where it feels like everything wants to kill him. He might not be native, but he isn't as confusing as a rabbit._

_He skips the outback if he can help it. The plants there are making do, the way they always have, and anyway, it's always had a very...cosmic taste to it. When his tongue flickers out, he can taste ancient beliefs and souls which don't so much despise or oppose him as fail to acknowledge him. They flew to Uluru once, white and black wings over bright orange earth, and neither of them said a word, and they left before too long. Some things simply don't concern you._

_It's the forests he's here for, anyway. The fires still rip through everything, the gums blazing fiercely. For a while there it looked like they might all burn out. Took a lot of miracles to get that balance going again, trying to find a model that didn’t immolate on sight, but it was worth it. Humans always marvelled at the frankly pretty ridiculous stuff that was going on with the animals on this continent; barely mentioned the plants, which are just as unique. Maybe Crowley's revived a couple (more than a couple); still, if you start counting then half the planet's outshining Lazarus. Worth a lot more than Lazarus, too. One human, getting showy with the miracles, although really he wonders whether the kid was just making sure it was doable. Wouldn't blame him._

_A spider larger than his head is watching him with definite interest. He leaves Australia to it._

\---

"I hear they have these orgy rooms here," Andy says with a leer as the ramp lowers and ejects them out into yet another model of gravity. "Modelled on these old Earth 'pep shows', everybody in a room watching sex, then you just sort of reach out and do it yourself. VR, so you can be with whoever you want. You should see some of the avatars people dream up."

"Peep shows."

"What?"

"Not 'pep shows', peep shows," Aziraphale says. There are _people_ around, all mixes of colours (green and purple and ‘sky blue’), very little of the white of the Fleet. More than anything it’s reminiscent of his old stomping grounds, and it’s a little alarming how uncomfortable he finds that. "And if you're trying to fluster or embarrass me, you're many millennia too late."

She does that head tilt of hers, azure and magenta and scarlet hairs twisting together. Looking at her gives Aziraphale something of a headache, even if the colours don't clash in the way that he feels certain they should. Perhaps, if he's being honest with himself (not like an angel, an angel never has such questions), he’s a little thrown by the sight of the red blaze peeking around the pilot's chair, before she twists out and round and the other colours reveal themselves, and the face, and the double image vanished. Almost felt insulting, seeing Crowley in someone else. The thought makes him fiddle with the ring; brush his fingers against the silk pocket square. 

"Did you ever go?"

It takes him time to catch up, or rather rewind (old phrase, archaic for her, probably). "Never," he says, although he allows, "I did use to live near some. I'm told they weren't bad for passing the time, at least for a decade or two."

"As in they were good for a decade or two, or you could pass a decade or two?" she asks, trying at impish, he thinks, while accidentally crashing into simple curiosity. 

"I didn't ask," he lies.

She 'hmms', and he dreads to think what that means. In his defence, he rather suspects those tales of second-hand debauchery were more of Crowley's posturing, playing the part of demon like one of his Kit's plays. (Aziraphale always had his suspicions about how Mephistopheles appeared in that play, and some of the later productions didn't help matters. Recently he’s caught himself reading his first edition and running a thumb under Crowley's self-deprecating annotations.)

Mercifully they fall into silence after _that_. That benefits their passing through customs, in that Aziraphale is so focused on his own thoughts that it never occurs to him that they should stop until they’ve already been thoroughly ignored and fed out into the main plaza. There he stops, if only to appreciate the similarities and differences with the last time he was here, amongst the final stragglers from Earth trying to make sense of it all. Laid out like a clockface, it’s simultaneously enticing and bewildering, just right for spinning a human any which way until they find the distraction of their choice.

In the middle of the plaza stands an enormous statue, glistening and sleek and not even pretending to be stone. Two figures entwined atop a base of chrome, swooping slopes suggestive of limbs, combining overhead to hold up a hovering glowbulb. Sometimes Aziraphale misses when fire was considered an acceptable part of statuary. Hazardous, perhaps, but the effect had been so much better. Glowbulbs have the same harshness as early LEDs, which is to say they lent any environment an unpleasantly heavenly feel. 

He remembers it well, from when it had just been erected, but like so many things seeing it anew more than a century on brings a different perspective. It belongs to a style quite unlike the edifices they build in the Fleet, with their illusions and smart materials. He honestly can’t say which style he prefers. Frankly they’re each as vulgar as the other, in their own way, so that it depends on whether one wants something gaudy, excessively modern (the kind of statue Crowley would have absolutely arranged close to his throne), or the more ‘nostalgic’ and inaccurate constructions stars away?

Without meaning to, Aziraphale’s wandered over closer, with Andy in his wake. Now, as he glances away ( _Not my fault I distract you_ ), he sees her scowling down at a hovering display at the statue's feet. "'The First'," she reads. She looks exaggeratedly from side to side. "Sure," she goes on, "don't explain anything. Just let us marvel at your incredible vision."

"Not everything has to be explained," Aziraphale says in the tones of one who has spent millennia watching the growth of art galleries and, furthermore, arguing in them.

"Doesn't even say who did it. Isn't that supposed to be a thing for the Oldies?"

Aziraphale closes his eyes and pictures calming things. A drink after a show at the Globe, perhaps, Crowley bitching in one moment and quoting in the next. Not that Crowley 'bitched' of course. _That's your thing, angel. I_ criticise _, me._ "Kunis."

"How do you know that?"

"It says so at the base."

"No, it doesn't."

Opening his eyes again, Aziraphale finds Andy pointing at the laser display and somehow conveying through that simple gesture the kind of insult to his intelligence which in prior ages would have required an extremely long and intricately punctuated sentence indeed.

"Behind that, dear."

When Andy doesn’t move, he does so instead, around the display until he stands at the foot of the statue. He hesitates a little on seeing its sleek base, shimmering colours, except he can feel her watching so he harrumphs a little and begrudgingly sinks to his knees. He knows it’s here – he _saw_ it. "They favoured individualism when this was built," he announces, "so I think you'll find – "

There. A rectangle of a different hue, almost imperceptible unless you know where to look for it. He spends all of ten seconds feeling around the edges before he scoffs and clicks his fingers. The panel obediently pops loose, clattering against the floor. Wincing a little at the noise, he awaits some sort of ill-mannered commentary from Andy – perhaps some further verdict on his unangelic nature, if he’s to go about miracling away alterations to art. That said, if she had anything akin to the insight into his life that she claimed, she would know better than to be surprised.

Knees dropped down next to his. Multicoloured hair tips close to the plaque, for all that it can be read perfectly at a distance of much greater than an inch away. Aziraphale hears Andy swallow.

"'Alpha'?"

"Kunis," he confirms.

Andy taps her fingers against each other, mouth tightening. "Like the stars?" she asks, her tone extremely odd. Aziraphale can’t say how, exactly. The best he can manage is that she suddenly sounds her age – not the teenaged presentation of adulthood, but a child in her own way.

_Go on, angel. Tell her._

That tone, on the other hand, Aziraphale knows intimately.

"It was something of a fashion," he says. "To signify hope."

Andy's knuckles suddenly turn white, hands clenched together. Her eyes are fixed on the plaque. "To be first out here?"

"Or to come here at all." He frowns. "There's nothing all that remarkable in it. They used to name children Mercy, or Aurora. The dawn," he goes on, when he notices her trembling slightly, "not the ship. Although I suppose that follows a similar pattern. Many of the fleetships do, actually. Rather on the nose, if I'm being honest, but I guess it didn't seem the time for anything more literarily obscure."

"Sure. Obvious. That's us."

In a flurry, she pushes herself to her feet and away, hands tangling in her hair and then her shirt, straightening and crumpling all at once. Underneath the silver shimmer of her make-up, she's gone the sort of pale Aziraphale still associates with fainting couches. When he tries reaching out, all he can sense was distress, thick and swirling.

"What's wrong?"

A beat too late, she laughs, the kind of forced explosion which definitely draws eyes over to them. Aziraphale attempts to convey the impression of someone who hasn’t technically broken open a statue only slightly younger than the station itself.

"Nothing, apparently," she says. "Everything's normal." _Tickety-boo._ She swallows, and again, rubbing her hand across her face, and Aziraphale hardly needs angelic empathy to smell the lies in the air. 

She stalks away, and as much as she clearly isn’t alright, Aziraphale doubts he can help with it. Indeed, he can’t help reflecting that he really can be a rather useless angel. No wonder Crowley thought they should work separately. 

This close and he still can’t sense Crowley. It’s lightyears away, Earth, yet he realises he’d rather assumed he would feel _something_. This absence, it’s like a solid mass, screaming nothingness in his ears. Echoless nothing like he felt before, when the solar system closed behind him.

It feels wrong to cover up Alpha Kunis’ name again. She’d seemed such a lovely woman, when she made this. She deserves to be remembered through it.

“Excuse me, sir?” 

He blinks upwards. There’s an individual standing over him, one whose countenance gives him pause if only because it really has been a very long time since Rome or masquerade balls. Their face is divided in half, one half painted the lead-paint sort of white that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Elizabeth I, the other perfectly light-suckingly black. What skin he can see has equally been divided up, so perfectly that he has no idea what colour they started out as. Their clothing is inverted, a simple dress shirt and trousers where white cloth sits against black skin and vice versa. 

“Can I help you?” he asks, hoping he isn’t about to be arrested for an act of petty vandalism. He assumes humans still care about vandalism.

“Would you mind coming with me, sir?” they ask, in the tone of voice that makes it quite clear that while this is a question with a right and a wrong answer, they will do their utmost to ensure only the right option is available. “My superior would like a word.”

“With me?” Quickly Aziraphale looks around, heart sinking. “I’m afraid that wouldn’t be possible – I’m supposed to be waiting here for – ”

“Your companion is invited as well. She will see you there.”

“Oh.” Slowly Aziraphale rises to his feet, although he doesn’t entirely straighten up. It doesn’t seem quite right. “Might I ask who your superior is?”

“He said to tell you that he’s your superior as well.”

“I…see.” Aziraphale does not see in the slightest.

“‘In space as in Heaven’, were his exact words.”

\---

_Crowley had been metaphorically stocking up all of his supplies in the same way that the humans have been doing literally. Whilst Aziraphale had assembled what books he couldn’t convince other humans to add to their luggage (there had been multiple arguments over weight, with Crowley having to explain that Aziraphale can’t miracle every rocket to consistently conserve fuel for half a library extra, it just didn’t work like that), Crowley had stood in one of his many storage facilities and thinking._

_He would not, in fact, save anything as small as an original Da Vinci. Not that he wanted those destroyed – poor example – he’d been sending those goods into space much earlier than the rest of humanity, figuring that Leonardo would like nothing better than the rare finished product drifting amongst the stars. (Crowley never did know what happened to Leonardo’s spaceship blueprints. After his death they vanished. It was why he thought to give Aziraphale the heads-up about keeping an eye on Galileo beyond simply enabling a mutual pasta arrabiata habit.)_

_No, Crowley had imagination. The sort of imagination that held a vintage Bentley together, that stopped it being impounded for fuel consumption (not that it had ever polluted, but he didn’t want to waste time explaining literal miracles to bored police officers)._

_Crowley intended to save the world._

\---

"Aziraphale! Long time no see!"

Aziraphale has encountered a great many individuals over the course of his existence, including most of the Host and a fair few demons who may or may not have come off better in the aforementioned encounters. Despite his supposed love of all things, this includes a certain percentage he would not have minded never meeting again. If he were to rank that percentage (Aziraphale has the mind for figures you might expect from a bookseller who never sold books and occasionally referred to taxes as 'hansom cabs' just to watch Crowley writhe), the archangels would be right at the top. (Lucifer, being a former archangel, also qualified.)

However, Aziraphale's wishes rarely have the impact he would like. As a result, he finds himself in space, in an orbiting casino, with his shoulders in the overfriendly and zealously uninterested grip of the Archangel Gabriel.

"How have you been?" Aziraphale asks, through the gritted teeth of an extremely polite smile.

"Oh, you know, business, business." Mercifully, Gabriel let go. Aziraphale hasn’t missed that sensation of fingerprints left on his arms. "Business is good, as I've always said!"

He had. Repeatedly. It’s something of an enormous earth-shattering relief for Aziraphale to recall that he is under absolutely no obligations anymore to affect even the smallest laugh.

Temporarily emboldened by this relief, he says, "Funny place for it. Alpha Centauri."

"It's not the place, it's the people." Gabriel's grin wavers ever so slightly in its plastic assuredness. "Isn't that how it goes? Our business is mankind, so here we are."

"I don't understand much about business," Aziraphale said, "but attempting to end it seems a tad counterintuitive."

"Aziraphale. Babe." It’s all Aziraphale can do not to gag. "I know you're not always up with the times, but trust me when I say that is way in the past. The world ended. We move forwards."

"Do you really? That's new."

"We're all about the new here! Now," and Gabriel levels his fingers at him in a way which makes Aziraphale expect to get shot, "I do remember you like the treats! What will you have – Tea? Chocolate?"

"I thought you didn't believe in ‘sullying your vessel with gross matter’."

"Oh, I don't touch the stuff, but you?" Gabriel laughs, as humourless as a hyena. "Can't imagine leaving the Firm exactly discouraged the gluttony there."

Aziraphale's mouth tightens. However, before he can find out what he’s about to say, the door to Gabriel’s office (still minimalist, still far from human, all the more jarring when manifested on the mortal plane) opens and Andy is firmly pushed inside. Unusually, this lacks the running commentary in the form of cursing. In fact, while she does shoot a grin at Aziraphale, she looks surprisingly subdued.

When Aziraphale catches the way Gabriel is frowning at her, he says quickly, "Well, this has been lovely, but I'm afraid now that my companion is here we really must be leaving."

Gabriels folds his hands together in a manner reminiscent of the sort of men in suits who used to wish to buy the bookshop. Still, his attention is back on Aziraphale. "Leaving to go where, exactly?"

"That's hardly any of your business."

"I think it is, sunshine." Finally – _finally_ – that realtor smile slipped away. Something old and assumed dead squirms inside Aziraphale, urging him to take a step back. He does, if only because the doors lie that way. "Meeting up with the boyfriend, is it?"

"As I said: that is hardly your business." He can do it. He can just walk out of here. Gabriel has no claim on him anymore.

"Right, sure. Why bother being good when there's bodily pleasures."

"A moment ago, you were encouraging them."

"I guess I figured you have one sin, why not all of them? Vanity suits you just fine too." The doors stay hard and cold under Aziraphale's touch, unyielding. "Sorry, I don't think we're done here."

"Well, I do." Aziraphale focuses and clicks his fingers. The doors don’t so much as quiver.

"Archangel, remember? Give me a little credit."

"I'll give you precisely as little credit as I think you deserve." Aziraphale turns back to face him. "What do you want, Gabriel?"

"It's funny, you know," Gabriel says, crossing his arms and cocking his hip. "I saw you land and I thought, 'Now what is he doing here?' You haven't been seen by anyone for a really long time, Aziraphale. Not since your boyfriend kicked you out."

Aziraphale moves without thought, without the slightest hesitation. Gabriel is an archangel and that knowledge is woven into his bones and yet in the space of a human breath he finds a neck under his hand, a coat in his fist, a smirk an inch away from his face.

"Did I touch a nerve?"

"Zira," Andy says.

"You don't mention him," Aziraphale says ( _now that’s a hiss_ ). "You _never_ mention him."

Gabriel clears his throat and looks over at Andy again. "I would really hate to have to get this suit repaired."

"Don't you have spares?" Aziraphale spits. Still, now the initial anger is dying down, it occurs to him that threatening an archangel with physical violence perhaps won’t entirely benefit their situation. He lets go and steps back.

Gabriel pointedly brushes down his suit with the tips of his fingers, working from the shoulders down to the cuffs. He spares a glare for Aziraphale. "I would be extremely displeased if you'd done any damage."

"I would be more than happy to leave you alone if you would simply tell me why we are still here."

Gabriel puffs out his cheeks. Looks between the two of them. "You sure I can't get you anything?"

"Quite positive."

Nodding, Gabriel leans back against his desk. It’s so casual that it catches Aziraphale off-guard. He's never known the archangels to deviate even slightly from their standard ruler-straight posture.

"You're going to Earth?"

"Yes."

"We want in."

Aziraphale blinks. "You want what?"

"We. Want. In." Gabriel pronounces the words as if cutting them out individually from the air.

"That's – " Now Aziraphale does laugh – hysterically. "You want to find Crowley? Why? Do you want to put him on trial?"

"Oh, I don't care about the demon," Gabriel says, waving a hand in the air. "I just care about what he did. Once we've finished with that, we can decide what we want to do next."

"Finished with what?" Aziraphale frowns. "And who, precisely, do you mean by 'we'?"

"Oh, you know. Interested parties, for one. The celestial host, for another – one to whom you still belong, even if you don't care about that."

"I'm not on your _side_."

Gabriel sighed extravagantly, leaning back to look up at the intricately moulded ceiling. "This isn't about _sides_ , Aziraphale, it's about the Lord's work getting sealed off by some jumped-up demon who doesn't share. Even an angel like you must see the evil in that. "

May She forgive him. Aziraphale hesitates.

Gabriel smiles. As always – as forever – that smile carries the edge of a sword, a smiting, and the kind of nastiness that can only ferment in a managerial environment. It is the smile equivalent of blood poisoning and remedial studies combined into one. Far too casually, he says, “You do realise that nobody can get in?”

“Nobody of angelic stock,” Aziraphale confirms, feeling a little frisson of pride despite how much this specifically inconveniences him. There’s also a foreboding sense of playing into another’s hands, with Crowley whispering _be careful, angel_. Nevertheless, he can’t help the way the love fills him, it’s just not in his nature, literally. It’s never once stopped amazing him, the lengths of which Crowley is capable or the power he uses so carelessly, as if he’d pickpocketed it and needed to shift the goods before anybody noticed. It’s Crowley’s, it was always Crowley’s, but somewhere in the imagined lengthy contract of the Arrangement lay a small condition stating that it would never be brought up. Aziraphale always knew there was something sparking under his demon’s surface, the powers which seemed distinctly beyond the norm (not that he had an awful lot of direct experience with demons). The lack of pride, of vanity, which spoke of the truth beneath simply clothing a corporation. A terrible demon indeed.

He realises he’s smiling, in the manner which several times on the journey has made Andy gag and reel off the list of historical events she would much rather witness than ‘the hideous epic of your own sappiness’ (a most cultured reference for which Aziraphale gladly assumed the credit). He can’t help it and doesn’t much want to. It’s a simple pleasure, like the smell of books and the taste of tea.

Gabriel narrows his eyes, his disgust less derisive commentary than a wall which seeks to suffocate. That’s always been Gabriel’s gift, even if he does use it appallingly. A disapproval you experience with all your senses, including the bits which require receptors the corporation can’t handle.

“Not just us and _them_ ,” Gabriel says slowly. “ _Nobody_ can get in. I’ve been waiting here long enough, and plenty have tried.”

Carefully, Aziraphale says “I was under the impression that humans had chosen not to go back. A new life amongst the stars, I believe the line went.” No mention of the acid rain or the toxic oceans, the extinction creeping up the food chain towards them. Aziraphale hardly needs to have propaganda explained to him, not even by Crowley. _You’ve had to swallow enough of it._

Gabriel understands the theory of laughter, Aziraphale thinks, of making a sound to indicate hilarity. It’s just that Aziraphale suspects he’s never found anything actually hilarious. Very few angels ever do. The single sharp exhalation, the one that actually says ‘ha’ despite that convention being poetic licence at its finest, isn’t about laughing, it’s about finding something (or someone) laughable. That said, this time Aziraphale can actually sense a squirming underfed entity which could be called amusement, for all that it resembles everyday amusement in the same way that a remora resembles a whale. It’s unnerving enough that he feels his face twitching to assume some placatory smile, of the variety it used to find so easily. The lines are still there, as they would be after 6,000 years. 

“You think that’s true?” Gabriel asks, with the performative incredulity of a fired cabinet minister showing that there is nothing up his sleeves. “Aziraphale, really. There’s embracing gullibility for your own misguided benefit – ” Aziraphale’s smile turns sickly sweet, the kind that on one continent would mean ‘bless your heart’ and on another ‘what did you say you do for a living’ and again ‘oh, an _artist_ ’ “ – and then there’s just being an idiot.”

Behind them, Andy helpfully mutters, “Takes one to know one.” Aziraphale tenses yet this time Gabriel doesn’t so much as glance in her direction, too busy leaning forwards, hands pressed together in the opposite of prayer.

“Aziraphale, he locked out _everyone_. Angels, demons, Horsemen, humans. He stole the entire damned solar system out from under them too.”

Gabriel carries on talking. Aziraphale knows that Gabriel carries on talking because he can see Gabriel’s mouth moving. However, Aziraphale does not hear any of the insulting patronising drivel spewing forth because his corporation has suddenly developed an acute form of what he recalls is called tinnitus (after Crowley spent the 1980s haunting various concerts and Aziraphale had to resort to communicating through a language system aside from oral).

Ignoring Gabriel entirely and not even feeling the warm Austenian glow of flouting social convention, Aziraphale turns his head to look at Andy. Andy, who for once has not perched herself on the closest and most valued surface, but has instead ensconced herself in the far corner. You would almost think she couldn’t hear them at all, as engrossed as she appears in taking a parodic interest in the movements of the holographic fish in the tank which sits there pretending to contain life.

He should ask. The question would be simple enough in simple verbal and grammatical terms. Unfortunately, you don’t have to have lived this long (officially the term is ‘occupied an earthly corporation’, but this is Aziraphale’s body, not the eyes and wheels he assumes for formal occasions) to know how the human throat closes up, the human brain exerting all manner of chemical deterrents. A pesky quirk, of the manner the Almighty enjoys shuffling into the deck, and exactly the sort of thing angels cite when facing the prospect of inhabiting such a ‘flesh prison’. 

One fish flickers back and forth, turning an exact shade of silk red which makes his stomach lurch. Another develops a yellow-gold hue, with a single black mark expanding and contracting, and he swallows. Fascinating, the way the body alerts the mind to what it already knows. 

“I should be insulted, really,” Gabriel says, gleeful at the fact that he is evidently not. “All that trust, and you waste it on everyone except Heaven?”

Angels are meant to be trusting.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. For an angel, trust simply forms part of their essential fabric. You cannot trust a demon, and the inverse should also apply. It’s one of those initial programming ideals which start breaking down the moment they meet practical use. Much like humans, angels can learn distrust. It just requires far more impressive feats of mental gymnastics, worthy of the bronze medal at the very least (even if demons would call the whole thing fixed, for the simple matter that they fix everything). 

Aziraphale had thought he was past that – the simple blind trust, free of choice or logic. That is because Aziraphale is the most human angel to ever exist. Self-delusion comes as part the biological framework.

“Andy?” he asks. 

She kicks at the floor, causing a scuff which instantly vanishes as Gabriel sighs. 

“I did say we were going to need help.”

“You _knew_?” She stopped the ship here. She – She came and found him. His mind can’t work fast enough for this, it seems, yet it scrambles nonetheless. Was this always a trap? Did she mean to bring him here, to Gabriel? 

The longer he stares at her, the more she turns away from him.

“You told me he’s in danger,” he says, and his voice won’t engage quite right. You can hear the quaver of celestial biology in it.

She doesn’t answer him. She buries her face in her hands.

“So!” Gabriel claps his hands together. “You in? We reckon we have a solution, and _you_ are just the angel to help us with it.” 

Feeling sluggish, Aziraphale says, “You never told me who ‘we’ entails.”

“Still quick on the uptake.” Gabriel beams, then raises his voice (not that there’s that much of a difference). “Alright, come on in!”

The air changes. In the face of Gabriel’s overbearing halogen presence, very few things can break through. Now, though, he can hear flies.

“It’szz about time.”

\---

_Some bits of South America, the echoes go on forever. Up in the mountains; down in the caves. Around the waterfalls, with their endless water._

_He's not sure how he wrangled that last one, frankly. Sometimes it feels like the world just needed the excuse. That and not having the humans around, like the designated party house crying out for one weekend free to manage a decent clean for a change. A whole species of fratboys. It makes sense, in its own way. He's been around long enough; he's been to Greece, and Rome, and Scotland before the Scots even got there. Something essential about it._

_He hadn't even realised how bad it managed to get. Oh, sure, he’d heard the news and paid about as much attention as you'd expect from someone who's theorised as to the correct pluralisation of the word 'apocalypse' (or listened while his angel went down that particular linguistic rabbithole, wondering at what point an extraction might be required). Maybe there was something about humanity in the air too, not to mention that good old demonic nihilism._

_Despite everything, Crowley had often reflected that his greatest and most inconvenient flaw is his optimism. Definitely one of Her jokes, there. He recognises that sense of humour._

_Then he walked the world – or slithered it, depending on the context – as the humans left and onwards. And, for the first time, he looked into the abyss._

_You would think a freestyle dive or stylish saunter into Hell would qualify as abyss-gazing. Turns out, for him, what it took was seeing just what the humans have done with the place._

_How long had he had with Aziraphale, after Adam died? Not long. Definitely not long, in the literal great scheme of things. And yet they hadn't done a thing. Too caught up in the happy ever after. As if there could ever be such a thing._

_So many of the countries around here have legends sunk deep into the ground, regardless of which borders and which times you have in mind. He'd actually felt at home here for a short while, what with them not seeing snakes as symbols of eternal damnation and all that. And then as you headed up you hit the second Eden of the world – at least that was how that rainforest always felt to him. The same richness in the air. More bugs with an interest in blood but that's paradise for you. Nothing without the fly in the ointment, or the snake, really._

_Growing back those trees_ did _take time. He doesn't even know how long. Irrelevant, when it was the only job going, the only thing that mattered._

__The world's lungs are burning. _He does remember that one. Won't ever forget it._

_Takes a lot of dipping into older memories to build all of it back up again, and he's not convinced he got everything. Just pours life into it; trusts the plants to set everything right again. He spends who knows how long without sunlight; with hair expanding in the humidity; with dirt under his nails and against his scales._

_Worth it._

_This is the world he restored. Eden. Hard reset. Turns out, the real answer was taking out the humans after all._

\---

“Lord Beelzebub.”

“Azzziraphale.” If Gabriel looks the same, then Beelzebub endeavours to exceed that. It doesn’t make coherent sense but then neither does seeing an archangel and a Prince of Hell in the same space – never mind the sheer chances in a universe this size. “You look worszze.”

“Thank you?” Aziraphale has never entirely followed Hell’s way of talking. It used to slip through when Crowley had performance reviews, the trouble with adjectives and performative inverses, making it quite impossible to pick out the insults. Perhaps it’s just as well that Aziraphale does not feel it lies in his best interests to act insulted regardless.

Beelzebub, fully hunched over with hands in their pockets, glances at Andy. “Who’szz the girl?”

“No idea,” Gabriel says. “She brought him here, though, isn’t that all that matters?”

Narrowing their eyes, Beelzebub stalks closer – possibly not to be menacing but rather because that is how they move. Aziraphale lacks the experience to be certain and is very pleased about that. After all, the last time he saw this particular entity, he was wearing Crowley’s body and quite thoroughly humiliating them. “She smellszz funny.”

“Oh, that’d be the Fleet,” Aziraphale jumps in hastily. “Yes, we’ve just come from there – rather different atmosphere to a space station, you see, and we haven’t really had a chance to freshen up and – ” Sure enough, Beelzebub loses interest in seconds and focuses in on him. Respectfully he lets the sentence peter out. 

“You talk aszz much aszz _him_.”

“It does seem infectious,” Gabriel agrees. He clamps a hand down on Aziraphale’s shoulder. “Obviously we would _love_ to go over old business, but right now, we have an alleged miracle to break and _you_ seem just the angel to do it.” Aziraphale fancies that he can hear his bones creak under that grip.

“I don’t see what I could do?”

“You know him,” Beelzebub says. “If the wall giveszz way to anyone, it giveszz way to you.”

“It really doesn’t, you know.” Considering it went up the moment he passed through, he hardly understands how anyone could come to this conclusion.

“Maybe not as you are,” Gabriel says. His fingers tense and Aziraphale grits his teeth. “But the way we see it, an archangel and an archdemon? That’s power. You just need to disguise it.”

Something sinks inside Aziraphale. It might be his stomach. It might be something more metaphorical. He remembers Troy (looking down at Crowley from the ramparts, for no other reason than if you weren’t on one side you must be on the other); he remembers the theory. He remembers the dead.

“He won’t let me in.”

“But you can force your way in, can’t you? It’s where you want to go, after all – it’s why you’re here,” Gabriel adds with an incredulous laugh.

“Juszzt a matter of waiting,” Beelzebub says.

Aziraphale looks back and forth between the two of them, as best as he can when held in place. “Just how long have you been here?” He can hardly bring himself to say it. “Together?”

“What’s that human saying?” Gabriel muses. “’The enemy of my enemy’?”

“Will be killed later,” Beelzebub says. “Humanszz a-plenty here. But the Earth iszz the point.”

“It is _not_ – ” Aziraphale says, but abruptly catches sight of Andy behind Beelzebub. She’s cycling through a whole number of gestures, some of which look quite rude. It isn’t until she starts drawing a line across her throat that the penny drops. Fortunately, by that point his confusion has resulted in his silence anyway.

However, the distraction has had other effects as well. 

“Hold still,” Gabriel says, as Beelzebub reaches out to him. “It’s just a power transfer. No need for all that screaming.”

As with most things Gabriel has ever said in Aziraphale’s presence, this fails to help in the slightest. Once you start screaming, it’s very hard to stop.

He couldn’t even say how long it goes on for – the light and the dark, the electricity filling him. At some point they must let go, for he finds himself on his knees. At some point they send him away, for when he blinks his eyes open for perhaps the fortieth time – forty days and nights, he thinks, _his travel options are limited_ \- he sees not the station but the squat hull of the _Eurydice_ overhead. The _Eurydice_ , and Andy.

“Zira,” she says, and smacks his face lightly. “That’s still you in there?”

He tries to speak but what comes out is more of a strangled moan. His limbs aren’t heavy so much as they seem to have transformed to gold and silver. There’s a lead weight inside his head.

“Close enough,” Andy says. “Do you think you can get up?”

There’s something important. Something about Andy. 

“We have to get onboard – I’m sorry, I just knew you wouldn’t do it if – ”

Her voice cuts off as Aziraphale surges up, pinning her to the ground. “You lied,” he says, in a voice that rings and buzzes at the same time.

Andy wheezes something in response, just as a voice in his head wonders _What the Heaven are you doing, angel?_ Ashamed as quickly as he was angry, he recoils, falling back as the powers slosh around inside him. He’s full to the brim, as if the slightest movement might tip him over and spill him out. Hard to say what he would lose first.

Rubbing at her neck, Andy crawls over to him. “I didn’t lie,” she says. “I know it looks like that but – He _is_ in trouble, Zira. He’s alone down there. He’s alone and they’ve been here trying to get in and – I don’t know which will happen first, I just know that he needs you. You shouldn’t have been apart in the first place but that’s the past, and we’re trying to fix it. _I’m_ trying to fix it.”

Peering up at her, Aziraphale says, “You could have told me.”

“Maybe.” Her mouth quirks, almost a smile. “I guess sometimes I’m just a kid.”

Barely aware of his mouth moving, he says, “That’s not a bad thing to be.” There’s an echo of it inside his head.

Andy hesitates. Then she sighs and slips an arm under him, grunting as she tries to pull him into a sitting position. “Look, I really can’t lift you and they just dumped us down here. Never mind what we all said: if you get up that ramp and point in the right direction, you see Crowley again. Your boyfriend, your husband, whatever you want to call him. Think you can do it?”

As if she even has to ask.

Grabbing hold of a strut to pull himself up the slope, he admits, “I’m not sure how I’ll manage this.”

“You’ll think of something. Just remember why you want to get to the other side.”

\---

_They took off on the last ship._

_They’d never even discussed this. It was simply there, the basic assumption that they would see this out to the end. After millennia of disasters which humans preferred to call ‘acts of God’ alongside the actual acts of God, nobody would be left behind. Nobody they couldn’t have saved, at least. This had led to some doomsday believers submitting irate complaints to whichever forums were still operating about the amount of pestering they had received from two gentlemen (in the end it was both of them) who simply refused to take no for an answer. Ironically, a great number of these complaints came from Christians._

_Pluto loomed in the viewscreen. In truth their route would not take them that close, and its inclusion in the procession had more to do with attempting to please both sides of a traditional debate which had taken on an almost religious air. It was, humans considered, not a_ real _discussion about space unless Pluto’s planet status has been argued about. Regardless of any individual’s views, they agreed that Pluto should be there for all to see._

_Others preferred to look at the massively delayed feed of Earth, ironically for a ship called_ Orpheus _, or perhaps only fitting. They were, after all, about to leave the solar system where they have lived all their lives. And they wouldn’t return._

_Crowley thought looking at the Sun would be more appropriate, if you were thinking in those terms, but of course he was not in a good mood. He wasn’t in a bad mood either. If he was going to pull this off, for once in his existence he could not afford to let moods get in the way. The only way to power like what he was planning lay through a clear image of what he wanted, and sheer bloody panic._

_“Funny, isn’t it?” Aziraphale said next to him. “All those times we talked about seeing other systems, and it took us this long to do it.”_

_Crowley let out a string of syllables which translate into agreement. A thorough translation would reveal a great deal of additional information, but his angel was distracted by both the future and the past._

_Aziraphale’s arm was looped through his, the comforting weight of all the years since the false apocalypse. Angelic warmth sinking into the scales which were always there, beneath the surface, metaphor carrying a far more potent weight for their existences. As much as he wanted to pretend, to keep his angel safe, he curled in closer. Storing it up, as if there could ever be enough._

_“We’ll be back, you know.”_

_Crowley blinked at him, slow and obvious behind his glasses._

_“I know it doesn’t seem that way now,” Aziraphale said, patting Crowley’s arm, “but, well. We have time, don’t we, dear?”_

_For a blind screaming moment, Crowley thought Aziraphale suspected. This wasn’t fair; this wasn’t_ possible _. His angel’s talent had always been sweet obliviousness, a calmer state of life by far than Crowley’s constant raging itching._

_He looked at Aziraphale, in so many ways the exact same as at the moment Crowley slithered up the wall of Eden. The same cherubic curls, the same twiddling fingers. The same sense of a constant wing extended, protecting Crowley as best as he could. As if Crowley could be protected. As if he were worthy of it._

_Crowley looked at the single being who had always believed him to be worth it. He didn’t even know what ‘it’ was, and he doubted Aziraphale did either. That wasn’t the point. It wasn’t just truth, it was faith as well. With all the angels and all the demons ranged against them, Aziraphale had faith in_ him _. The Fallen. The Serpent of Eden._

_“Yeah,” Crowley lied, with all the rich sweetness of the first bite of an apple. “We will.”_

_There was a concept any witch or occultist would understand, any number of religions and belief systems. Even the Christians bought into it, and the angels and the demons. This was because God operated on this system. It was hardwired into the universe._

_The concept of sacrifice._

_Not the cutting out of hearts or offering up of virgins sort of sacrifice. That is the sort of belief which leads to all sorts of nastiness, because there is nothing more terrifying than a human who considers themselves to be doing the right thing. No, the sacrifice here is much closer to, say, the sacrifice of paradise for knowledge – because Crowley had never held back, in the Garden, as to what might happen. He’d told Eve about the Fall, as best he could with a fledgling species which didn’t even have a concept of death yet. Eve had known that God was not forgiving, and she’d decided that ignorance was not bliss. As far as you could decide, when free will was hanging at arm’s length._

_Crowley never forgot Eve. He got her into so much trouble, her and all her descendants. She didn’t forget him either, even if she did die so very long ago. He hadn’t held her hand as she died – that was Adam’s job, with her children and some pisstaking angels gathered round, angels who conveniently ignored her cursing with the blithe assurance of those who know this bit will be left out of the book. No, Crowley had slithered in at night, the night before, up her arm and curling into her pillow. She’d called him Her Snake, which was much nicer than some of the insults she’d flung out at him earlier._

_He couldn’t say quite what makes him think of Eve right now. Maybe it was the taste in the air, that whatever happened next, it will never feel as good as before_

_In the end, it took just one breath. That was the advantage of still having that backdoor into reality of the old-school angels. It was rusted and grown over and took so much shoving and pulling in just the right way that you couldn’t really be bothered, but it was still there. Lurking behind the ivy, 'all' you had to do was roll the rock away, and there was the door._

_He took a last look at Aziraphale. The angel turned away, and Crowley knew if he didn’t go now, he never would. That Aziraphale’s eyes would meet his own, and inevitability would hold him fast. Only one moment, here already, that he’d been dreading since Eden._

_Crowley remembered when time was just hypothetical concept._

_One breath, and he was back on that over-heated flooded toxic third rock from the sun. One more breath before Aziraphale realised and tried to follow him. Crowley had never been big on breathing – better than Aziraphale but he was also better at singing than a duck – but suddenly he got the concept. Seconds didn’t mean a thing right now._

_The_ Orpheus _was leaving, one last painful literary reference Aziraphale would take with him. Crowley had always skipped to the end, so he knew what to avoid. What the mistakes were._

_Never mind all the fuss about how exactly to identify Pluto: for the longest time, humanity believed it was the edge of existence. That meant, at some point, so did Adam Young. Crowley had found these pockets here and there, the things it never occurred to the Antichrist to put back or that he didn't see the point in changing. He’d pinched most of it together; now Crowley just has to seal it all the way behind the ship. Keep them out. Keep them moving._

_On its own, it isn't enough. On its own, it would still strain every part of him that didn't burn out before and it still wouldn’t work. Which was where the core of it settled in. Dug in. Cut deep._

_If Crowley did this, he would never see Aziraphale again._

_Even if Aziraphale looked back, there couldn’t be anything for him to see._

_Tartan wasn’t Crowley's thing, but he'd worn that collar for well over a century now. He touched it now and he thought. Thought about that tartan encompassing the only angel worth liking, the bastard who was going out to the stars with the rest of humanity and who was going to complain about it constantly and never once think about leaving. The only entity Crowley would ever trust to look after them._

_He pictured Eden. He didn’t mean to; it just popped in. All the colours turned up a thousand-fold, between the newness of creation and what he knew were his own love-soaked memories. The wing extending so casually overhead, as if it meant nothing. The unassuming goodness of Aziraphale, underneath the fussiness._

_There was a wing stretching over the solar system. Underneath, the_ Orpheus _passed by into the new._

_The wing fell._

_Crowley didn’t know if he was human, snake, demon, fallen, eyes or teeth or anything in between. He just knew that he was screaming._

_Sacrifice. The real power._

\---

It's agony, breaking through the barrier. Not just the physical pain that has Andy screaming loud enough to sear her throat: the metaphysical kind that requires celestial heritage to comprehend, where comprehension is the death sentence. This is thwarting a miracle, after all. Not adjusting some clothing to suit, or turning a light on and off: the kind of willpower which doesn't give way simply because you want it to.

Gabriel's power is horrible enough, slick and easy and clinging. Aziraphale had shaken hands with him in the past – at Gabriel's insistence, of course – and it always left a perpetual need to wipe his palm clean on his trousers. Its glossiness reminds him of pomade and hair gel, every terrible sensation when you try to touch someone's hair. ( _It's style, angel, somebody has to have it._ ) Once he manages to push past the archangelic power, though, he's left with Beelzebub: flies buzzing in his ear, the constant search for the rot in the universe. The taste of decay which had him checking every available reflection on the way to the console, to make sure his face is still there, still whole.

"It can't be that bad," Andy had said, back in the _Eurydice_ and instantly back to herself, at least enough for a little quietness to go unremarked. "You're basically a super-angel now, right?"

"I might be slightly sick," Aziraphale had said – extremely truthfully, it turned out. Which only made Beelzebub's power sit up and take notice in a whole new way, sending his stomach roiling. Or perhaps that was Gabriel, so disgusted with 'gross matter'.

Aziraphale isn’t sure whether he’s remembering this or seeing it all over again. What with the splintering of power in front of him, through him, dimensions feel rather more slippery than anybody could possibly prefer. Third and fourth and all the rest. Perhaps he’ll end up back in the first century. Or before. Perhaps he could change things – only, no. Not permitted. And not a solution, to run away all over again.

The glue holding the solar system shut: it isn’t glue. It isn’t planks, or shields, or weldings, or anything like that. Knowing who he is dealing with – knowing Crowley, always _Crowley_ – he can see the truth of it, the way none of them could because none of them have really tried, have they?

It’s vines. Vines and thorns of power, spread out wide and then bound in tight.

So Aziraphale, who has never been a horticulturalist of any description, slices his way through.

Stories and beliefs give shape to things, and nothing more than the universe. It's just as well, because at the same moment he brings the metaphysical and metaphorical sword down – at the same moment that Andy fires up the very real engines and sends an extremely physical ship flying straight at the wall – the pain begins.

And it's still beginning.

And it might never end.

With what coherence he has left, Aziraphale bends the architecture of his form around Andy, and prays that a human can survive this. That this isn’t the kind of miracle that demands a pound of flesh, that nobody has to die for someone else to be saved.

It’s light and noise and it’s the absence of both. It’s everything and nothing and it’s the sensation of Crowley’s hand in his, the moment Crowley vanished, the loneliness ever since.

It carries on and on and on – 

\---

_Call it irony. Call it fate. Call it that old sense of humour – the one he'd assumed left the building a long time ago. All Crowley knows is that he’s getting ready to leave, hopping continents again, thinking about how this was the right decision after all, just look at the evidence, solid plan there – and then it hits._

_It's like there's a bubble in his head. Ask him before and he'd never have thought of it, never dreamt about it. Now though, there's_ something _pushing. Something_ invading _. He tries to push back but quickly realises that he doesn't have the metaphysical hands for the task, because he doesn't understand what's happening. He's up to his ankles in soil and rainwater, squinting up at leaves which only let through slivers of light to the undergrowth. Good thing snake eyes aren't like human ones. Doesn't show him anything, though._

_The pressure builds. It's going to burst, whatever it is, and Crowley doesn't so much collapse to his knees as to his belly (all over again), as if scales and fangs might help him. As if this could be any more comprehensible to a serpent._

_There's a sensation which tastes like a sonic boom sounds; feels like a kaleidoscope looks. Maybe he's writhing and maybe he's screaming and maybe he isn't moving at all – he certainly couldn't tell you. There's just a hole punched through him, as surely as a sword._

_He sees – only 'seeing' isn't the word, only if you count the kind of eyes unique to those of angelic stock – the sky split open. Not overhead, but out there. And suddenly he realises._

_He realises because a moment later, it fills him._ Love. __

_Demons aren't prone to sensing love, other than as a suspicious smell in the air. Crowley, as ever, is the exception. It doesn't help that, as much as this love can be sensed in a more general way for the entire planet, it's also reaching out for him. More than that: it fairly lunges for him, from the edges of the solar system. The edges where nobody should be._

_It isn't that the love knows where he is. It's that not knowing doesn't matter. It finds him anyway._

_He's left a dazed pile of snake on the rainforest floor, in amongst the leaf detritus and a hundred species of ant. He's shivering, it seems, which must look very strange on a snake but he doesn't feel up to shifting. In fact, right now he doesn't even remember how shifting works._

_The worst part is that he knows what has happened. He knows_ exactly _what has happened._

_And he is afraid._

_Because this should never have happened._

\---

– and then the utter totality and incomprehensibility consuming existence stops.

Aziraphale's human senses return slowly – his hearing especially seems to have suffered something similar to an explosion, but angelic screams aren't entirely dissimilar, so he presumably only has himself to blame. When he can see, he looks to his right, and Andy is shaking and crying and half-collapsed over the console but she's alive.

He's uncertain which of them moves first. All that matters is that she is sobbing into his shoulder and he is holding her close, murmuring every nonsense word that humanity has ever gifted a parent. "You did very well," he tells her, as best he can when his voice emerges hoarse and strained.

To his relief, he realises the borrowed power must have burnt up in the transit. Either that or Crowley made sure to keep that kind of force out.

_Crowley._

Once again he sends the thought out without conscious choice, a memory and a longing. He waits for some sarcastic witticism conjured up within his mind. What he gets instead is one faint resonance. And then another. Something responding to him, inside. The kind of presence he would know anywhere, and up until this point he doesn't think he realised how profoundly he'd lost it.

He buries his face in Andy's hair, and he cries too.

\---

_His tongue tastes the air, and it’s like the world ended again._

_Too soon._

_Not soon enough._

_That it should be impossible means nothing. A demon shouldn't be able to seal off the world from the species it was handed to. His angel is better than him, so it only makes sense. The moment he passed through, Crowley felt it, and his mind has been going too fast ever since._

_Run to him._

_Run away._

_He's a snake: he can't do either, when you think about it. The way he only manages to think when everything speeds up inside his head and it's like all the waiting was for nothing – except he wasn't waiting, he didn't plan for this, one sacrifice and it would be over. That's all she wrote. Except it's not all She wrote, maybe. If She's still there to get Her kicks._

_Funny, how realising the one ship doesn't carry a whole contingent of humans takes the edge off. It's another Crowley disaster, nothing bigger. One ship, and unless the humans have done something decidedly extra with physics there can't be many onboard. Unless his angel's started travelling with company again. That happened the last time Crowley vanished himself for a while. (Is it too late to go to sleep?)_

_There's that unmistakable taste of angel in the air. You don't notice it's gone until it's back. Bracing and tingling, mouthwash and sea salt._

_He can't handle this._

\---

It's hard to say which of them is more surprised to see the Earth.

Andy lets go of the controls but that doesn't matter. Aziraphale more than expects this ship to reach its destination now, which means that nothing short of Her intervention could prevent it happening. The controls just sit there as she launches herself across the console, and the casual miracles are just as well given the buttons her scrambling knees inadvertently smash. The viewscreen was bad enough, but as they round Mars she's lost.

"Is that what a marble looks like?" she asks.

"Allegedly."

That's not right.

The Earth – it looks exactly the way it used to. More so. Aziraphale remembers the pictures the astronauts sent back, the ones that put Crowley in a snit even though he never stopped showing them to Aziraphale. It's all blue and green and white, Eden set aswirl. It is decidedly not the planet Aziraphale saw almost two centuries ago. This is an Earth reborn – enough to make his fingers twitch and his eyes narrow as he tries to detect some kind of illusion, some sort of punchline. He's never been good at spotting those.

There's nothing. The hum of miracles in the space around him, the way he remembers. It settles against him, throughout the reality which surrounds him.

" _That's_ where we all come from?" Andy asks, practically sprawled against their cramped vacscreen. Aziraphale's both grateful and distraught when she blocks the view. "That's home?"

“If you want it to be.” Then he smiles, and takes her hand where it lies close enough to reach. “Yes.”

It seems too cruel to ask her to focus on landing the plane. No doubt they should be surrounded by flames and heat on the way down, the sort of effects that belong in one of Crowley’s blockbusters, except Aziraphale doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want to lose sight of the Earth for a moment, regardless of what physics demands, and he doesn’t want her to think of fire and flames. Instead the vacuum gives way to clouds, and then the ocean spreads out below them, the ocean and landmasses he knows intimately, and he stifles a smile that tastes of salt. Of course. Where else could they land?

The checkerboard fields of England begin to come into soft focus. Obediently the _Eurydice_ finds a field in which to settle, open and familiar, enough that Aziraphale can already taste it despite the flatness of recycled air inside the ship.

As they come to a rest, the struts hissing, he exhales the last of the power inside him. Andy leaps up and away, thundering away down the corridor. He lets himself have this, a single moment as the angelic part of him sinks back underneath his skin. Then he stands, stretching and clicking his neck, and takes hold of his lapels. His thumb brushes red silk, and while he is still an angel, he remembers humanity well enough. And he turns towards the exit, and the world.

\---

_It wasn’t easy, rebuilding the world. Not exactly in Crowley’s standard repertoire. In fact, his only qualification here was that he actually did know that he couldn’t miracle it. He'd handled enough plants in his time. You could get away with the small flourishes here and there but plants did not appreciate maintenance by miracles alone. It was like greenhouses: the tomatoes never did taste the same. (Apparently. As much as Crowley appreciated human invention and ingenuity, he couldn’t say that he minded all that much when Aziraphale had had that particular gripe.)_

_Take the rainforest. You could miracle some trees back together, maybe, or speed up some growth if you really want the local flora to insult you behind your back (and they did, that was the thing, never trust a plant that wasn’t capable of being a dick to a human). You could try all you want but you had to leave the forest to grow again on its own._

_What you needed was time. Not seconds stretched out, or preservation: actual Time, the kind only She got to mess about with because only She could change the definitions while looking you right in the eye (metaphorically speaking)._

_What the humans had done to the planet? Honestly, that was their own kind of miracle. It figured it would be the one Crowley never thought much about encouraging. It took more than a mostly-retired demon to handle that one._

_They were supposed to be retired, together, the two of them. South Downs and all that jazz. Then the coastal erosion, and the rising sea, and one day you realised the sky might as well be on fire anyway. That's what you got for making something in your own image, maybe. Human bodies did all sorts of things on their own – Crowley had been trading on exactly that for centuries, squaring away the slightest temptations to send in to Head Office. A Head Office that was supposed to be leaving him alone, and, to be fair to them, they did. For a while, anyway._

_He tried not to do the whole pining on clifftops thing. He wasn’t Meryl Streep and anyway the wind kept blowing his hair in his face. Better to keep busy. Job to do. It was a lot of trust, handling the whole planet._

\---

To Aziraphale’s surprise, he finds the sight of Andy rather adorable really, as she tries so very hard to pretend she doesn't care that she's about to set foot on Earth for the first time. Aziraphale doesn't even know for whom she intends this performance, since it's certainly not on his behalf. Humans have always engaged in this practice, and it would be endearing if it weren't so infectious.

"Have you ever been on a planet before?"

Reassuringly she still scowls at him, although her legs keep on jiggling despite the fact that she's standing upright. "You know I haven't."

"Well, I didn't want to presume." It's right out there. Earth. The world that's always been home to him, even when home should have meant Heaven. Both of Aziraphale's worlds, although right now he can only sense one. That's all right, though. One thing at a time.

"Sure you didn't." Andy's hand twitches towards the door release; pulls back. Taps against her leg. Reaches out again.

Aziraphale decides to help. "I can do it if you scared."

"I'm not scared," she snaps, and sure enough she all but punches the button, enough that Aziraphale winces and hopes she hasn't broken anything.

Presumably a comment would have followed, regarding how very not scared this proved her to be, but as the hiss of the seals filled the air, she just stares ahead, suddenly frozen.

Part of Aziraphale wants to watch her, to see the wonder on her face. That part of him thinks he should stand back; allow her this moment alone. That would certainly follow the classic way of doing things: non-interference. Allowing humans to do things for themselves. Blame the exposure on Alpha Centauri, but he fractures once again, aware of the action deemed appropriate for the angelic host.

In the end, however, even as his thoughts clearly state the correct action, he takes Andy's hand.

She doesn’t thank him, but she doesn’t let go either. Human fingers curl tightly against his own.

The door opens, the side of the ship separating into overhang and ramp, and there it is. A wash of vibrant green and brown, pink and yellow. The sound of life – not human life, but all the rest, tweets and chirps and cries. Andy jerks back but he holds on tight. He'd almost forgotten, the way the sounds permeate everything. This isn’t how they'd left it though, or even before that: this is the sound of Eden, of the millennia when the humans stayed close together. 

For once, he makes the first move. One step, then another, and the delayed hollow clump of her boots behind him. As they begin to descend the ramp, he can see the sky opening up on either side overhead, brilliant blue. The full expanse of it, a definition you rarely saw in space and never in the same way. A sense of gravity, of something above, even though to an angel that should have meant very little indeed. The sky is space with an atmosphere, and yet seeing it again, at last, he can’t stop staring.

For a moment, he almost feels whole. At peace. At home.

It lasts up until Andy gags and pulls away, clamping a hand over her face. "What the _fuck_ is that smell?"

He blinks as the feeling shatters at her, rather justified in experiencing the sort of whiplash he generally only encountered in vehicles driven by those unhampered by fears of their own mortality. Uncertain, he tries laughing, only to stop when she looks offended. Then he tries sniffing at the air, finding no scent of burning, or animal faeces, or decay at a level where a human nose might perceive it. It just smells...Earth-y.

Oh dear.

"What do you think you can smell?" he asks carefully. This is probably his job to explain, and he feels the same sinking feeling as when Mary had started arguing that she couldn't possibly be pregnant.

Andy waves her hand at the air in a singularly unhelpful gesture. "How the fuck should I know?" she demands, with enough anger that he has to look away before she can see his smile. "Smells worse than trash duty."

"That's, well." Aziraphale can sense an approaching conversational pothole. "That's the smell of Earth."

She looks at him. "I've done gardening duty too, Zira. I know what earth smells like."

Ah yes. Space gardening. All controlled and regulated, with extensive hygiene protocols, and you still hear people complaining whenever you want a pleasant stroll. He's always rather liked it himself, the recollection of soil and growing things. _But then you would, wouldn't you?_

Carefully he says, "Then you noticed that it does have, well, a rather noticeable scent?" Anticipating some sort of scene, he barrels on. "And that's on a spaceship which hasn't so much as floated above a planet for decades – "

"Orbited."

" – so what might you think the effect could be when all of that is multiplied by the size of Earth?"

His first thought is to attempt to project the least punchable aura he has at his disposal. His second is that he absolutely should not do that, given its correlation with achieving the opposite effect. His third is that in the meantime he has absolutely no idea what his face is doing, because that is what happens when bodies possess automatic functions.

Very slowly, Andy removes her hand from her mouth, whilst still guarding her nose. This makes little logical sense but follows familiar human psychology. "You're telling me that the Earth stinks."

Aziraphale does know how to smile sweetly. "It smells differently to a ship in space, yes."

Andy frowns. She looked around at the ground, and instantly falls back several paces with wide eyes. "There are things in the grass."

"I assume they're insects." He follows her gaze. "Ah yes. Ants. Not the type to bite humans, though."

"Do you think that smiling makes the world sound less horrifying?"

"Perhaps if you'd engaged more often with your studies – "

"School doesn't cover this!" Finally Andy fully uncovered her face, choking but apparently determined to carry on. "When they talk about Earth, they mention plants and animals and shit, but – oh fuck." She goes stock still. "Something is on me."

With extreme care Aziraphale approaches – not for fear of whatever insect has taken a natural interest in a human, rather for fear of what a panicked Andy might attempt. "Ah yes," he said. "It's a fly."

"You made that up."

"Technically you did – well. Humans did. One human. I don’t blame Adam for starting to run out of ideas, really."

" _Zira_."

Delicately he brings his hand within an inch of the fly, and it buzzes away. "There. No harm done."

Andy glared at him, and at this point he decided it was time to make a retreat. Let the girl come to terms with the Earth on her own for a short while.

As he steps away, inhaling the scent of grass and apples, he can hear Andy’s complaining starting up again, exclaiming over every last insect and still gagging on the smell and demanding to know what exactly is on her formerly-pristine boots. He can't really blame her, but that doesn't mean that he has to give her his full attention.

Funny. It's only as he stands here, looking up at the hill nearby and its winding forest as if nothing ever changed, that he realises he actually was expecting more. He was – the silliness of it dawns on him – he was expecting Crowley to be standing right there. To disembark and instantly have everything back the way it was. And he shouldn't read into that absence, of _course_ , only it's one of those pesky thoughts that never quite leave you alone once you've been infected with them. Something not unlike 'there doesn't have to be a war'.

Aziraphale's never actually had to search for Crowley – not _really_ , not in any way that counts. They just...ran into each other. For centuries, millennia even. And then they exchanged letters or phone calls and that was certainly easier but it hardly changed the way coincidence had a tendency to fiddle with their lives.

He closes his eyes and breathes in; takes in the world as it is now, fresh and green. Being an angel, his two eyes embedded in a human skull don't govern him, and he moves forwards with an ease that returns to him after the initial stumbles and close encounters with the plant-life. Andy's voice fades, albeit never quite vanishing.

This time, as he inhales, the bite of something in the air reaches out and beckons to him. He may have spent a very long time in space (in human terms) yet Aziraphale has never seen any dimming of his olfactory memory, especially when it comes to the things he takes pleasure in. This is sharp and juicy and he can't help but laugh to himself at the sheer hamfistedness of it. Crowley would be appalled; spend the entire evening complaining as he drank his way through the closest alcohol to hand. And yet that is how their own lives work, he supposes.

Opening his eyes again just for the honesty of it, he reaches out and takes the apple from the tree. It's perhaps not as ruby red or glistening as the true ideal; this truly is Earth.

Still, it crunches, and Aziraphale's mouth fills with the kind of taste you can't get anywhere else. The kind of taste Crowley's always tempted him with.

_I'm here,_ he thinks, gazing down at the apple. Crowley’s symbol, after a fashion.

_Come find me._

\---

Come find me.

_Like it’s that easy._

_Much as he’d love to just ignore it, prayer’s a funny old thing. Wired into the sourcecode, or whatever the phrasing is. You Fall before the humans even show up and you still get lumbered with them, only instead of the boring holier-than-thou sods you get the boring damneder-than-thou sods. Demons still have to respond to a summons, albeit less present and correct than you’d expect from an angel still drinking the Kool-Aid._

_And if you think that’s bad, try seeing what happens when an angel and a demon pray to each other._

_Not one to be abused, that. Like someone grabbing hold of your brain stem and yanking as hard as they can. First time Crowley was on the receiving end – literally, the phone receiver, har har, he feels sick – he didn’t so much collapse to the ground as he did manifest his wings, lift several inches up, then shift into a snake and then appear in the bookshop all in the space of about five seconds._

_They promised they wouldn’t do it. But promises are slippery things these days, he supposes. It’s not like he didn’t start it._

_Don’t ask, angel. You don’t want me to find you. (I know exactly where you are. I’m part of the Earth now, I know when something new arrives.)_

_Only it’s a prayer._

_It’s been a while since Crowley had to formulate a really good loophole, but if he can imagine an adaptation to climate change, he can manage this._

_So long as he remembers he wants to._

\--- 

Aziraphale has been standing by the ship for hours, possibly, just waiting. Always waiting.

Surprisingly, Andy hasn’t pushed and prodded at this to the point of severely questioning humanity’s alleged self-preservation instinct. As much as Aziraphale has passed into that timeless state which usually accompanies reading, he’s designed to be a guardian, which means that he’s equally aware of the movements of the first human to tread on the Earth’s surface in a hundred years. How could he not be, when there are so few of them?

Andy paces the edges of the field, and then down the middle. She goes back on board the ship, and from the hum of power and his relaxed senses she’s having a rather thorough ‘shower’. She emerges cleansed, takes three steps in the mud, and stops and breathes through her nose in a rather ostentatious manner. Aziraphale just stands, and idly feels the waves of anger, frustration, inspiration, and back to anger.

Eventually, she comes to a halt in front of him. She’s flushed a colour she’s never exhibited before, not even when full of fury. At this point Aziraphale belatedly realises that this is her first time outside of a temperature-controlled environment. And other problems. “Ah, I’m sorry, my dear.”

Her right eye twitches. “Because this planet is a hellhole?”

Trying to ignore the phrasing, Aziraphale passes his hand between them, from Andy’s head to her toes. “There,” he says. “Forgot about the solar radiation, I’m afraid. And the diseases.”

“The what?” From past experience, Aziraphale assumes that was supposed to come out as dull and uninterested. Instead, she sounds genuinely alarmed.

“Well, there have always been any number of species on this planet alongside humans, back to the Garden of Eden. Disease travels, especially after, well,” he hesitates, “after the Almighty felt…offended.”

Andy’s mouth flattens into an unimpressed line. “Am I going to die from that fucking fly?”

“Not anymore, no.” He smiles brightly. She does not. Instead she starts touching her arms, then scratching at them as if the might of miniscule bacteria could be defeated by human fingernails. “If you want a proper bath, I believe there’s a stream nearby.”

“You mean…water?” Her gaze goes distant for a moment, and Aziraphale waits. “Okay, that’s – fuck. That seems like a waste.” Save for the occasional mining, melting, and extreme sterilisation of passing asteroids, there’s no source of new water in space. “That’s – you want to come with me?”

Aziraphale shakes his head. “I’ll wait, thank you.” When she doesn’t move, biting at her lip, he says, “He’ll come. I know he will.”

“But you can’t come see a stream?”

The thought of leaving pulls at his insides. As if that would be a betrayal in itself. The old habits are still there, not so far under the surface: the knowledge that he’s the constant, the rock for Crowley to orbit if you like. Never mind that he’s been out travelling the galaxy. Never mind that Crowley pushed him out there.

“Lead the way, young lady.”

\---

_The first thing that crosses Crowley’s mind is how easy it would be to kill her._

_There’s a human close at hand, clearly oblivious to anything about the world, and he could slither up while she slept and sink his fangs in. He doesn’t know what her clothes are made from; it wouldn’t matter to his fangs. He could hang in the trees and hiss for her to step closer, hold her arm out. It’s been a long time since his venom was used for anything but words, but it’s still there, ready. He’s hasn’t used it in millennia._

_It’s an instant’s thought, and he feels ashamed before he can remember that he doesn’t experience shame. Unfortunately, the thought’s out there, his imagination so vivid that he might as well have done it._

_It doesn’t help that he’s still looking at her because he doesn’t want to look anywhere else._

_An angel fills the space available anyway, that’s why you have corporations and architecture to keep them just a little bit in check. It’s how you can sense them from planets away. Only this –_

_He twists away into the grass. Into the shadows. Out again, flirting with the sunlight._

_There’s another light out there, something that resonates inside him. A matter of atoms, protons and electrons. The sort of thing you forget about when you’re amongst humans, or animals, until it’s like taking off a blindfold. You have to peek or it burns your eyes out._

_How is he here? He shouldn’t be here. Neither should she – especially her._

_He's still caught in that endless loop, practically eating his own tail, when the light on him suddenly feels different. Don't ask him how, or anything that means putting it into human words. Some things don't translate._

_He lifts his head, tongue flickering out to catch the not-a-taste and not-a-smell of the change in the air. Not for the first time, he wishes snakes had eyelids. Seems cruel, forcing him to keep looking like this. Serpent eyes might not be the best, but they don't have to be. Not for this._

_There, on the other side of the river, his angel is looking at him._

\---

Not once does Aziraphale think this could be any other snake – that there might be new additions to the British countryside when left to run riot. In fact, he doesn't see the form after all. Doesn't have to.

Walking on water is frowned upon amongst angels, at least since it became such a propaganda boom. And Aziraphale doesn't walk: he runs. Three steps across the river and he's vaguely aware of his wings snapping free onto this plane, driving him forwards. It still doesn't feel fast enough, though, while there's still air between them, and he's reaching out because just saving those inches means everything if he can touch a single second sooner.

He's falling to his knees but that's alright, because already the serpent is swelling up, filling out into limbs and bright red hair as sure as a dying star, and then the two of them are in an ungainly tangle on the ground, soil smeared across Aziraphale's knees and grass already leaving stains on his elbows. The two of them. He couldn't care less about the mess, because without any conscious decision his fingers are wound into that wonderful hair and he's kissing, kissing _Crowley_ , beautiful all over again.

He wants to look; he doesn't want to stop touching. It ends up all a mess, really, what with only pulling back enough to say "Crowley" before he has to kiss again, and diving in to kiss only to realise that they have so much to talk about, so much that he wants to say. It doesn't help that Crowley appears to be suffering something rather similar on that front, what with the way his lips keep trying to say "angel" even while Aziraphale would much rather keep them occupied. There's no mistaking the closeness, though, the way Crowley winds his head towards Aziraphale's as sure as any charmed snake.

Aziraphale is hanging on tight; he doesn't feel Crowley touching him.

Once the initial wonder has passed – not that it will ever truly be past, this love bubbling and boiling inside him like a first breath – that one tiny detail starts to niggle at him. Nothing major, he thinks, except. Except Crowley always used to touch him, hands constantly moving, fingers always checking that he wouldn't move, that he wouldn't go anywhere. It had been a little heartbreaking, truth be told, and the memory of that pang splits through the happiness to assure him that this is worse.

He pulls back – the hardest thing he's done, probably. He can only bring himself to put a distance of a few breaths between them, enough to see Crowley's eyes. Those eyes, like stars at the heart, space in inverse. Oh, there are so many words crowding up inside Aziraphale's head now, thousands of things he's seen and experienced and all of them words he wants to apply to Crowley. There's just so much to tell him. They once went a millennium without seeing each other. How did they ever manage it?

Crowley's staring at him. Slowly, with the kind of creeping realisation which feels far too much like watching the sky over Egypt on the Israelites' last night in slavery, Aziraphale realises that it isn't the same kind of wondered gaze as his own. Crowley's eyes are wide, yellow right to the brim, and now his mouth is free it's half open as if laden with a scream.

Sprawled there in the grass beneath Aziraphale, limbs tense, Crowley finally says the first words Aziraphale has heard from his lips in two centuries.

"What went wrong?"

Inside Aziraphale something strikes a discord, a neglected piano left out to rot. "I – " His mind scrambles. The part of him that's immortal, angelic, is reaching out – he can't help it – and it's like reaching out into the vacuum overhead. Nothing "What do you mean, 'what went wrong?"

Crowley sits up on his elbows, leaning forwards but not to close the distance, not really. "Why are you here?" He's insistent, voice low with too much hiss behind it.

For his part, Aziraphale finds himself leaning back, just a little. "Why does something have to have gone wrong for me to be here?"

"Because you shouldn't be."

_You shouldn't be._

_The point is not to avert the war, the point is to win it._

Aziraphale doesn't mean to make the connection. The thought just leaps into his head in that panicked moment, and now it's there. The rejection. The horror.

"Angel, listen, are they alright? Are the humans alright?"

Aziraphale nods, barely. His body seems too far away to control with any certainty. "Of course," he says. "The humans, they're – Everyone is fine, more or less."

"So why are you here?" Now Crowley does finally touch him – a hand on his arm, just shy of his shoulder. "Hell? Heaven? They shouldn't be able to get in. I don't even know how – " Crowley stops short, frowning. He looks up at the sky and then back at Aziraphale. "Did you break it?" Then, when Aziraphale doesn't answer, just stares blankly at him, he asks, "Why?"

Always asking questions. That's his demon. Perhaps.

"Can you answer me something, first?" Aziraphale asks.

Crowley glances around, still not settling. "Like what?"

"Did you have any intention of seeing me again?"

Crowley doesn't say anything. Crowley doesn't say anything for too long – not that the first hesitation isn't bad enough, only then it stretches out into a silence which is as sure as an answer. When he looks away, it's really just punctuation.

All that time alone in the archives, at least Aziraphale believed he had Crowley. That this was just a momentary inconvenience in what was, after all, immortality. All the time in the world. They lasted 6,000 years afraid to touch, so what was a little more.

Now he doesn't even have that.

"You shouldn't have come, angel."

Aziraphale swallows. "No. Apparently not."

"It's not – " Aziraphale stands up and now Crowley finally moves forwards, too fast, so that he's almost crawling on his belly the way the Bible always claimed. "Angel, no, it's not like that. The whole point was that you couldn't be here – "

"Of course." There's something happening. Something shattering. Aziraphale can hear that holy edge to his voice, the kind the archangels have. "Why would you have me here? Silly, really."

"Angel, no." Too late, Crowley finally manages to get his limbs in order and sways up, grabbing at Aziraphale's lapels as if his legs still can't manage the burden. Aziraphale lets him. "It's not that – fuck, I would have given anything to have you here but that was the whole bloody point!"

"To get rid of me?"

"To get rid of everyone – you think it's easy, sealing off a whole solar system like that? _The_ solar system? That takes power and the only part of me that's up to that is the part that loved _you_ all that time."

"'Loved'."

Crowley lets out one of his exasperated sounds, the kind Aziraphale has never forgotten. It's small comfort to know that he remembered it right. "Love, whatever, this isn't the time for language!"

"It isn't the time for anything, it seems." Aziraphale's face is not inclined to anger, not like Crowley's. It takes concentration to manage something with more forceful than his accustomed disapproval. "Why the humans?"

"What?"

"Why keep the humans out as well?"

"You're – You're joking, right?" Neither of them is smiling. "You saw what they did to the place! I was trying to fix it; they'd never stop coming back!"

For most of Aziraphale's existence, Crowley has been the constant. Never mind his changing appearance, the hair that lengthens and shortens at will, the style that never stops shifting with the tides of history: _Crowley_ is Aziraphale's fixed point. Or he was. Because right now, all Aziraphale can think is that he's looking at a stranger. This is not the same entity which made conversation on the garden wall, or the same one who gambled to prevent the end of the world.

"Do you still think they were worth saving?"

Crowley has never blinked often – at least, not that Aziraphale is aware of, with the glasses always keeping him at arms' length. This Crowley has no such glasses, and yet as he blinks slowly he feels further away than ever.

"No need to answer that."

"Aziraphale, wait – "

He never thought it was possible. Nonetheless, Aziraphale turns his back. And he walks away down the river, without a second glance.

\---

_It's hard to say exactly when it happened._

_Maybe it was waiting out the rain, trying to sift away the acid with plants that might stand a chance of converting it even as the brick and steels got eaten away. Maybe it was the oceans, trying to figure out what to do with all that plastic. Maybe it was just trying to fix the air, until he didn't need tricks to make these stupid human lungs work the way they should._

_At some point, all he could think about was how quickly it might all fall apart again._

_It had to be ready. It had to be perfect. Box-fresh perfect, the way it hasn't been since Eden. Give everything the best chance it could possibly have._

_Hang the world though. Or hang everyone else. Either way, there's his angel – no – there's_ an _angel, vanishing. Still a sacrifice whichever one of them does the leaving, because it's still him doing it._

_He just wanted to save the world._

_"You're not God, you know."_

_Crowley freezes. Actually, that's too small a word for it: all of those useless human limbs lock up, until it's not emotion keeping him in place, it's a complete failure of his own corporeality. It's hard to say how a few words could feel like needles in the back of your neck. It's simply true that they can._

_Someone steps into view – a girl, the human, the one who brought Aziraphale here. Up close, there's nothing new about her, the same way humans have always stayed so consistent. Eve used to look at him like that, and he didn't like pity then. He's also never liked that slightly derisive look, the raised eyebrow as if it might fall and squash him at any moment._

_"Too soon?"_

_"Who are you?" he growls. If there's a little demonic energy in there, he's being very restrained indeed._

_"Andy," she says, which does at least jar with the building inevitability in the air. He snorts. "Yeah, laugh it up. At least when you chose your name you didn't have to worry about your parents making a whole fuss about it."_

_He thinks about being polite – about how disapprovingly Aziraphale would look at him otherwise, the disappointment laid on thick with the sad downturn of those lips. Then he remembers that Aziraphale left. And he remembers that he could have killed this woman and played for time. "You made a mistake, coming here."_

_"You made a mistake, staying."_

_He pulls himself up, trying to recall how all these limbs interact. It's been a long time since he's been like this – fully human, as far as a demon can be. So much easier as a snake, really. He isn't sure why he spent so long away from the scales and the shadows – he belongs there, after all._

_"I have visions," she says, as if he cares._

_"Good for you."_

_"Of the past, a lot of the time, which always seem to end up involving you two. Kind of insulting, if you ask me."_

_"Do I look like I care?"_

_She shrugs. "Honestly? You don't look like you fucking care about anything. Which is kind of weird, by the way, because usually when I see you two you care so much it's really fucking embarrassing."_

_He sneers and turns away, already feeling the scales creeping up his spine._

_"You know some dramatic exit isn't going to fix this, right?"_

_"Who says I want to fix it?" he retorts._

_"You do."_

_His back seizes up, sure as if she grabbed his spine in her puny human hand. He pivots back, feeling how sharp his teeth are, his eyes yellow as pestilence. "Listen, girly," he hisses, "I don't much care who you are, or what you think you know about me, but I strongly suggest you leave before I am the last thing you ever see."_

_"You think you're going to kill me?"_

_"I know I am."_

_"Up for killing kids, now?"_

_"You're all human, aren't you? What difference does it make?"_

_She takes a breath – just a small one, but it makes him shiver. The taste of fear. The demon in him is uncurling at the thought._

_"Crowley," she says, voice soft and young, "can you even hear what you're saying?"_

_It doesn't sound quite right, but what does it matter? What does any of it matter? "I'm not so sure you do."_

_"I get it. I do." She takes the smallest step backwards. Stupid, really, with the river there. "You cut yourself off and it's easier that way. But you love people – you do. I've seen it?"_

_"You don't sound so sure."_

_"Look – " A scuff and she starts at the water licking at her boots. "Crowley. Please. You're – This is why I'm here, I think. You should have been so happy to see him – you always are, every time, I've seen the way you light up and you never stopped looking at him, not once."_

_He pauses. He remembers Aziraphale turning away. "Didn't make any difference though, did it?"_

_"Please." She grabs him – actually grabs his arms, holding on and staring at him. "Crowley, you've been alone this whole time and you shouldn't have been. You fixed the world, well done, but you need to fix this too."_

_It would be very easy to push her into the river. "You brought him here. You did this."_

_"I wasn't sure why," she says. "I told him I was but all I knew was that you had to be together. History doesn't look right, otherwise."_

_"Not sure whether you noticed, but history died a while ago."_

_She chokes out a laugh. "Yeah. Looks that way. And I wonder whose fault that is?"_

_As much as he wants to carry on, he frowns. "That – Okay," he steps back, just a little, "no, I don't get that one at all."_

_She doesn't do a very good job at all of covering up the way she exhales, heavy and relieved. "Yeah, honestly? Me neither." Letting go of him, she runs her hands through her hair, smiling in the irrational hysterical manner of a human confronting just how much she doesn't understand. "I just know that it matters. When I try freestyling – when you just type whatever comes into your head? That always comes up. And when all my visions come back to the two of you, and the only other stuff is how to bring you back together – well. Wouldn't you give it a go?"_

_His hands find his pockets. He'd forgotten he even had pockets. "You're telling me that you can see time beyond the usual human linearity wibbly-wobbly_ stuff _, and you used that to make me and Aziraphale..._ talk _."_

_"You saw how it went just then." She shrugs. "Seems to me that talking can only be a good thing."_

_"We seemed to be doing alright without doing that."_

_Now it's her turn to snort. He does not appreciate it and temporarily considers the possibility of drowning her again. Unfortunately, without that rush of demonic energy in his stomach, the guilt hits him first._

_Instead, it's him who steps to the water. Gives up on this standing business and collapses, feeling it wick up his jeans. That's another thing he'd forgotten the details of: jeans. Bloody awkward but they keep your legs together._

_The view in front of him is safe; familiar. It's his work, after all, year after year after decade. He helped grow all of this, alone. He didn't need the help, and he didn't wish for it. (Not after the first century.)_

_"I'm not done yet." The thought emerges out of his mouth. That happens a lot, really, when the only ones to hear you are the plants, which know better than to laugh._

_"So here's the thing." Carefully –_ very _carefully – Andy squats down next to him. It's sort of fascinating in its own way, how now that he looks he can see she's trying to hold herself away from every little thing. He gets the sudden and very vivid impression that if she could hover in mid-air, she would. There's mud up to her knees - from crossing the river, he assumes, since he can't easily think of how she got over here otherwise. Her pink and blue and red hair (nice colours, he thinks) is sticking up every which way. Even without the threatening business, she'd look a mess. Entirely out of her element._

_"What?" he prompts._

_"It's not just about you." She says it with such seriousness, such dead-eyed certainty, that he finds himself giving her the honour of not laughing. "You want to fix the Earth, great. But you've got to know when to say enough is enough."_

_"I've never said that."_

_"No. He says that for you." She glances away down the river. He wants to look but he doesn't think he can stand seeing nothing but his own work. "Don't you want someone to say you did a good job?"_

_"I've rather outgrown that sort of thing."_

_"No, you haven't." She offers him her hand. "Now, where do you think he’d go?"_

_There's somewhere. The place he hasn't gone. It's always there, at the back of his mind, and he hasn't exactly been content but he's let it go. Even brushing against the thought of it sends an echo of music through him. Stronger than Rome, or anywhere else on Earth, the imprints they've made._

_“I suppose it’s always nine o’clock somewhere,” he mutters._

\---

The Ritz, in the year 2019. Everyone thought they were just slaves to tradition.

When an angel and a demon want a moment to last forever, it sticks.

There aren't any people around. Not really. But you can hear the echo of them in the air – a constant sense that you've only just missed them. It should be unnerving; it remains comforting. A soft presence all around, knowing that all will be well.

Aziraphale brushes his fingers against the cloth covering their table. Every detail is exactly right, because that's how they remembered it. He never gave it much thought at the time, too concerned with savouring the moment, the newness of the day and the demon before him, always beside him. It really should have ended there, only that was the problem: it didn't end. That was the whole point.

Devilled eggs in one place. Angel food cake in the other. Not the same courses at all but the details could contradict as much as they liked and the image would remain. You can practically hear the 'chink' of glasses in the air.

He sits in his place. It occurs to him that he could sit in the other, just to see the world how Crowley saw it, only he finds that idea disrupts the softness of this past. Instead he indulges in one last memory. There have been so many for him, in his archive, recalling the way things were. Believing them to not be mere past tense.

Who knows where he'll go now? The fleet already seems as far away as the Globe or Golgotha. Staying here, letting himself vanish: it has its appeals. If Gabriel and Beelzebub want the place so badly, let Crowley blast them out of the sky. That seems to be all he cares about.

Taking up the champagne glass, he mutters, "To the world."

"To the world."

He sighs, closing his eyes. "I'd rather you let me have this one, Crowley." Too cruel, taking this memory as well. Leave him alone there, please.

"Seems the sort of thing you can share." The chair beside him scrapes out and in, the unmistakable scuff of snakeskin shoes on rich carpet. You wouldn't think there could be such a distinctive sound to it, enough to pick out of a hundred thousand. You would be wrong. And you wouldn't be in love. "At least leave some champagne for me."

With that Aziraphale's eyes fly open, furious. He stands up, ready to lunge, only - only Crowley is sitting there. Just sitting, looking up at him, face open, and it's awful because Aziraphale can already feel his resolve shattering. He tries to remember the river but oh, he doesn't want to.

"I think you should leave." He pauses. "Or perhaps I should. That is what you want, isn't it?"

"Not at all." Crowley starts to stand, then falls back in his chair. "Please, I – Angel. It came out wrong, before. I'm not – " He winces, growling one of his strings of incoherent consonants. "Look, I'm sorry, all right? It – None of this sounds right, I'm not – " He clamps a hand over his face and goes silent, ears reddening.

Reluctantly, Aziraphale lowers himself back into his seat. However, he remains angled towards the exit. "Eloquently put."

"Shut up," Crowley says into his palm. "No, don't – stop but don't?"

There's definite distress humming in the air. It rather clashes with the music, yet Aziraphale can't bring himself to wave it away for the sake of the illusion. Mostly because, when he listens, it still resonates the same. The words are a mess yet that hardly matters in the face of the relief spreading through him, seeing _Crowley_ underneath it all.

That does prompt him to say, "By the river. Did you mean that?"

"Which part?" Crowley peeks at him over his fingers. "Angel, I'm not sure what I said. I just – I panicked, alright? And you kept talking and I – I can't say it the way I want to. It just won't come out right."

"I will say that you don't sound yourself, my – " Aziraphale shuts his mouth quickly. He knows Crowley notices. Nevertheless, he coughs as if that somehow smoothes it out, moving on. "Would it be worth taking a moment?"

Crowley is still covering his mouth but Aziraphale can see his skin pull tight on one side of his face. That's all the detail he needs to know the exact expression, just how much of a smile. "Think I've taken more than that. Didn't help."

Well, Aziraphale can hardly deny that. He sits back in his seat, folds his hands in his lap, and he waits. Waits because he has no idea what he could possibly ask, what single answer could somehow resolve all of this. Waits for what, he couldn't say. It feels as if this is all part of the same waiting, somehow.

"The thing is, angel," Crowley says, and Aziraphale lets himself exhale, "they shouldn't want to come back."

"Heaven and Hell have their own monopoly on that, do they?"

"Forget Heaven and Hell, will you? We're talking about the humans." Crowley leans forward, tapping a finger on the table. "They’re out there now, whole big universe waiting for them. I should know, I helped put it there. They finally get away, both sides focus on this place, and what does this planet have for them that a million others don’t?”

“It’s their _home_."

"Not this lot. They – Wait." Crowley stands up abruptly, leaning at an angle traditional human spines would certainly struggle with. "You, space girl!”

Looking around in surprise, Aziraphale catches sight of Andy lurking by the foyer entrance. Judging by her wide eyes and her aborted attempt to hide, she hadn't exactly expected the summons.

Nevertheless, her expression settles very quickly and she shouts back, “You know that’s like me calling you Hell boy, right?”

“Not a contradiction. Look, how many generations since your family’s been here?” When she doesn’t answer for barely more than a second, he points at her in triumph, turning back to Aziraphale. “You see? It shouldn’t be important, where they started out. They’ve never been here. And they shouldn’t be looking back, not when there’s so much /forwards/ to be getting on with.”

"Shouldn't they decide that?" Aziraphale asks. "Isn't that the whole point, letting them decide?"

"Or at least letting us decide with some facts?" Andy asks, now hovering awkwardly besides the table, a somewhat jarring reminder that this conversation is happening rather later than the year 2019. Her silver and white clothing and shimmered face don't exactly match with the decor of the Ritz – something of a relic even at the time, and wonderfully so.

"What facts matter?" Crowley asks. "You escaped! Off out in the unknown. Brilliant future to look forward to."

"That's all it is, though," Andy says. "Just a future. Nothing behind it." She looks at Aziraphale. "Do you remember that statue in Alpha Centauri? Of Alpha Kunis?"

"Of course," Aziraphale says, then adds to Crowley, "Space station. One of the first major settlements, as a matter of fact."

Crowley looks rather delighted. "Lovely place. Excellent choice."

Aziraphale can't help saying, "We were supposed to see it together," even if the way Crowley instantly wilts is rather inevitable. "Besides," he adds, extremely aware that this is insult to the injury, "I'm afraid Gabriel and Beelzebub have – I suppose you would call it 'set up shop' there." He doesn’t mention the casinos, or any of the rest of it. That might undermine his point.

"What?" Crowley looks between the two of them, as if Aziraphale would actually choose to joke about this. "What are they doing there?"

"No Earth," Aziraphale reminds him. "Just humans."

For once, Crowley does not even attempt a comeback. He just frowns down at the table.

"My point is," Andy says, interrupting, "there was this statue with the name covered up. Like people didn't want to know. And her name – " Her voice catches and she stops, shoulders lifting. "It's my name. Sort of."

Aziraphale reaches out to touch her hand, even though "I'm afraid I don't understand."

"Or it might as well be." She sighs, too hard, and he winces a little in sympathy for her throat. "You said it was a fashion, right? Naming after the next destination." She twists her head from side to side. "'Andy'. It's short – It's short for Andromeda."

"The princess?" Aziraphale asks, at the same time Crowley says, "The galaxy?"

Andy stares at Aziraphale incredulously. "No, the – Yes, the galaxy, what princess?"

"Ah. Never mind."

Crowley says, running a finger along his cheekbones in a rather distracting way, "Have you lot made it out there already? Wouldn't have thought that was possible."

"It's not, that's the point. It's supposed to be an aspirational thing – looking to the future, everything you said – only that's exactly what they said about Alpha Centauri!" She gestures to Aziraphale. "That's exactly the same thing you said. They didn't stop when they got there, and they don't even acknowledge it! And by the time the Fleet reaches Andromeda, then the final destination'll have moved again! It'll just keep going, on and on – which would be fine if that was what the aim was, but it's not! They act like there'll be an end to it, like the journey isn't what matters, only that's all it is! What kind of a future is that?"

She stops suddenly, staring at the two of them. Aziraphale has no idea what she expects either of them to say. All he knows is that suddenly he can see it: the endlessness of it. Nothing to an angel, of course, but they're not talking about angels.

"Isn't that how She punished Moses?" he muses. "He only ever travelled."

"He saw the end though," Crowley mutters. “That’s mercy for you.” He drags a hand through his hair. "What do you want to hear, then, space girl? That there will be an end? We can't do that."

"Well, first of all," she says, "you could give us a home to go back to."

Crowley's eye twitches, quite noticeably. "There are enough planets out there. Pick one."

" _Crowley_ ," Aziraphale says.

"What?" Crowley demands, holding his hands out to the sides as if daring Aziraphale to do – well, he doesn't know what exactly. "They're free to choose, it's not my responsibility to just hand them everything." Then his face changed abruptly, as sure as swallowing down a lemon. "Oh. Fuck."

"I did say when we met," Andy mutters.

Aziraphale looks sharply between the two of them. "What?"

"I'm not – " Now the lemon seems to have gone rotten. "It's not the same. It's not the same at all."

"Sort of is," Andy tells him. 

Understanding dawns. Not that Aziraphale wants it, once he realises, only that's the thing about dawn. Leave everything running and it becomes inevitable. "Oh – Crowley, dear, I – "

"Don't." If Crowley thinks a single finger could ward Aziraphale off if he really wanted to reach out, he's quite wrong. As it is, he restrains himself just barely. "I don't want to hear it." The words are muffled as he buries his face in his other hand, enough for his fingers to drag at his hair. 

Aziraphale's heart breaks for him, all over again. His Crowley was always the biggest presence in the room, even when trying not to be noticed, because Aziraphale was always there to see him. Like this, he can still see the shape, only there's a double image: his demon alongside the ghost of something, hollow and shivering and alone. He wonders when Crowley last so much as ranted uselessly at Her, the way he always used to.

Andy finally pulls a chair up, perching on the edge of it as if it isn't a period piece (in a rather nice and accurate sense, really) but just the pilot's chair all over again. "I get you have a lot to think about, but here's the thing: every day humanity gets further away from here, and Earth just turns into a thing to yell to win elections."

"They still have elections?" Crowley asks.

"Not sure whether you'd call them that, but yeah, something like that. Rigged as fuck - you'd recognise that part."

Crowley shoots a glance at Aziraphale, who looks away. "You know I've never interfered in those."

"Oh, sure, 'greater good'," Crowley says. "What exactly _do_ you do up there, anyway?"

Before Aziraphale can answer, Andy says, "He sits in an archive and doesn't talk to anyone."

Aziraphale splutters. "That is a gross mischaracterisation – "

"So, like a bookshop?" Crowley pops the word with relish. "Figures. You help out, though, right?"

If Aziraphale twiddles his thumbs, he hopes the table blocks the view. "I...preserve things."

Crowley's eyes narrow. He jerks a thumb at Andy. "Then why does she say there's no history to anything?"

Andy doesn't even have the decency to look ashamed. "Because it's true. Not much point to an archive if nobody goes to look, seems like."

"I rather think you've misunderstood the point, there," Aziraphale tells her, despite the fact that Crowley is nodding along because he has the patience of a gnat. "It's so that you _can_ look."

"But if nobody asks the questions - " Andy stops with a growl, leaning back to glare upwards as if She might resolve this. "Look. We all agree something has to change, right?"

"Well," Crowley drawls, "for starters, angel, you could do what I expected you to do."

He can't help it: Aziraphale gapes at him. "What you _expected_?"

"Sure: I take care of the planet, you take of the humans. Not hard, is it?" Apparently oblivious, Crowley adds, "Tell me you've at least been looking around. First time off the planet in over 6,000 years, you've got to enjoy the view."

"Of course I've been _looking_ ," Aziraphale snaps, thinking of his nook before the vast expanse of space. Never as good, experiencing a place on your own. "But traditionally it is considered good form to _inform someone_ of your plans." The fact that Aziraphale had surmised the expectations correctly does not comfort him in the slightest. "How precisely did you intend to inform me that you were finished here?"

Crowley's mouth presses into a line.

"Well, then." It's hard not to feel fragile as a shattered stalactite dangling overhead. "Forgive me if I wasn't the only one operating under false expectations."

"Oh, don't do that," Crowley says, hanging his head backwards, the same tone of voice as he always adopts on encountering his own 'f-word' (as he puts it). "Look, fine. I'll go look after the humans and you stay here. I've done most of the work for you, you just make sure nobody with wings decides to drop by. Theory still works."

"My dear," Aziraphale grinds out, "I would greatly appreciate it if you stopped thinking of me as something to give up. I'm not a sacrifice." When Crowley pales, just a little, it's a little like putting your foot down to find not reliable stone surface but a void. "That – That isn't how you've been thinking of it, is it?"

"Course not," Crowley says, not looking at him. 

Aziraphale swallows, trying to pull back a little on the anger rumbling inside him. This isn't the time. 

After a silence, Crowley snaps, "Look, it's easy enough. You've got two of us and two places. That's just – what do you call it – maths. Not even complicated maths at that."

Hoping Crowley doesn't agree, Aziraphale says, "We could both stay here."

"No," Crowley says instantly, and Aziraphale exhales. "And we can't both go there – "

"Why not?" Andy interrupts.

Crowley scowls at her. "Because, space girl, apparently Gabriel and Beelzebub are right outside this solar system, if they're not inside already."

"So let them," she says with a shrug.

Crowley shakes his head so vehemently that that lovely hair swirls like a nebula. "They don't get Earth. Ever."

"But what's the point without us?" Andy asks. "Besides, there's two of you now. Plus whatever Zira's got leftover from borrowing."

Crowley looks at Aziraphale, who quickly shakes his head. "Another time, dear."

"My point is, you've got an angel and a demon, plus some residual archangel and archdemon – "

" _What_?"

" _Later_ ," Aziraphale says. "Thoroughly unpleasant, I assure you."

Andy clears her throat, so pointedly that she might as well have jabbed both of them physically. "I'm not saying you do the whole system again. Just, if the only way you'll come is if you know the Earth is safe...put something up. A shield, or cameras, or whatever it takes. Or just leave it open so we can start finding our way back, I don't care."

"And do what, exactly?" Crowley asks. 

"Come out to the Fleet," she says. "Do what you said you wanted to do: be a part of humanity. Help us. We don't have a past; you've both been there for all of it."

Aziraphale feels his eyebrows raise. "Sorry, you want us to...interfere?" He fidgets a little in his seat. "Directly?"

"If you like. Not sure it's still interfering if you're a part of all of it, though." 

"Oh, sure," Crowley says sarcastically, "just one celestial and one occult being showing up and telling people what to do. No religions ever started that way, and I've been worshipped in the past and it actually is not all that pleasant."

"Oh, yes," Aziraphale says, "that trouble with the Satanists. Excellent Victoria sponge."

Crowley gives him a look, which he doesn't mind in the least when it's accompanied by that half-smile of wonder.

Andy throws her hands in the air. "Then I'll tell them. Start spreading the word about Earth, all that - just so long as you two do the work too. None of this subtle guiding business, or waiting for stuff to blow over. You both want to be on the same side as humanity, start acting like it. Be part of it."

Something occurs to Aziraphale at that moment. Hearing Andy talk – seeing the passion starting to bubble out of her as she fights for her species, the building glow in the air around her – he suddenly realises the answer to what's been bothering him from the start. The question of tenses, all over again.

Crowley is looking at him. "What is it?"

"Prophets," Aziraphale says softly.

Andy stops short. "Excuse me?"

Judging by the way Crowley looks sharply at Andy, then back, and is now shaking his head, Aziraphale rather suspects that he's right. "You told me you're a prophet, despite only knowing the past."

"Bits of the future," she insists, " _Bits_. That's enough."

The thing is, Aziraphale spent a very long time being Heaven's agent on Earth. He's very familiar with the look of the people he used to be assigned - and the ones he assigned himself to. "That's one meaning of the word," he says. "But prophets used to be the leaders. The ones with vision in a rather more...metaphorical way."

He never realised Andy could hold herself so still. "No."

"I'm with her," Crowley says. 

"She's volunteering, though," Aziraphale says. "That's usually all it takes."

"You're telling me that after millennia they've never refined the criteria?" Crowley asks, in the sort of articulacy that usually means his brilliant mind is starting to work very fast indeed.

"It was never particularly up to any of, well, them." Aziraphale gestures towards the ceiling and the floor. 

Andy announces, "I hate this plan."

"Makes two of us, space girl." Crowley's brow is furrowed though.

Aziraphale leans forward, suddenly feeling the spark of inspiration inside. It's not the same as for humans: it's certainly divine, only because everything involving angels becomes divine by default, but imagination is a rare thing, so the better term might be 'human'. "We could go back. The three of us. And we can _warn_ them, this time, about our – our old sides." When Crowley stays slunk back in his chair, Aziraphale adds, "After all, is it still free will when you don't know you're choosing?"

Crowley taps his foot. Aziraphale can't see his hands, yet he assumes they're thrust into his pockets as best he can. "That is _low_ , angel." 

Aziraphale smiles beatifically, in the way only an angel can.

"Bastard."

"Just enough to be worth knowing."

Quite obviously Crowley tries not to smile. He fails miserably.

"Besides," Aziraphale says, "you recall what that makes you."

He puts his hand on the table. When Crowley doesn't move, he turns it palm upwards, fingers curled.

Crowley shifts in his seat, looking everywhere except at Aziraphale. Grumbling and hissing, he finally snatches the slightest of touches, then instantly curls his hand under his chin as if that had always been his intention. 

Sighing, Aziraphale reaches out, and takes his hand, properly. It quivers under his touch like a baby bird, and he gentles his hold, just a little.

Andy buries her face in her hands. "You two are so much worse in person."

\---

_“’_ Eurydice _’,” Crowley says flatly. He stares at it in all its squat offensive wrongness, a blot on the natural landscape, and can’t tell whether he loves or hates it._

_"It's just the one she chose," Aziraphale tells him._

_"Of course it was." Bloody ridiculous. Maybe the – his – angel is onto something about this prophet business. Call it divine destiny or God having a laugh – same thing – but things are definitely going out of their way to line up that neatly._

_The girl, he's not so sure about. Still, they have the whole journey for her to decide what she wants to do. Whatever it is, somehow Crowley can almost believe Aziraphale when he says it will all work out. That's the best he can manage, and when he tells Aziraphale, he can see that his angel isn't entirely satisfied but at least he lets it go. All he does is take Crowley's hand and press a kiss into his hair, and that's already too much for Crowley to process. The touching; the love._

_Incredibly, it's even harder to get on the ship than he ever expected. He stares up into that metal tunnel, the first step into the future for him, and it's like the Earth is gripping at him._

_"It'll still be here," Aziraphale says softly._

_"What happens if they mess it up again?" Crowley wonders, and he isn't sure which 'they' he means._

_"You'll fix it again," Aziraphale says, with the kind of certainty that anchors Crowley's bones. "Even better, no doubt." His hand tightens. "Not alone this time, though."_

_"I guess not." Never alone. Oh, it's tempting, the idea of leaving the noise behind, not having to account, going back to the simplicity, where he only ever had to deal with his own thoughts. But there's a lot to be said for having his angel to argue with them._

_He tries to let go as he steps onto the ramp, thinking he has to do this, consciously. Aziraphale doesn't let him, though, and so there's someone holding onto him as it closes behind him, shutting out the sounds and the smells that have been his life._

_"If you want to learn how to take off," Andy calls from the cockpit, "I'm not going over it again."_

_Aziraphale is looking at him expectantly. "I'm fine, angel. Really."_

_"You say that," Aziraphale says. "But I think you should go look, anyway."_

_Andy doesn't welcome him into the cockpit with open arms, if only because Crowley can tell she's never done anything like that in her life. That should get interesting, if she ends up going the way she could. Crowley just hopes she doesn't die young, like the rest. Prophets do that. He should keep an eye out, just to make sure._

_The world is already a muted green through the window. Shields, he supposes - something for solar radiation, or light. It hits him, just how much he doesn't know about all this. For once, Aziraphale knows more about space than him._

_Andy indicates a big red button – just the kind that screams out to be pushed. "You want to do the honours?"_

_His leg jiggles – technically a good thing, unconscious movement in limbs, but odd and twitchy nonetheless. He feels Aziraphale's hand on his shoulder and exhales. Relaxation doesn't seem likely, but at least he isn't shaking anymore._

_He presses down, and they leave the Earth behind._

\---

Aziraphale finds Crowley by the airlock, drumming his fingers against the metal. "I wasn't sure if you wanted to watch."

"Because I missed it last time?" As if Aziraphale doesn't remember Pluto. Doesn't remember the last sights, when they should have been of Crowley.

"Not many people get the chance to say goodbye twice."

Crowley sighs, exaggerated and with the whole of his body. "I thought the whole point was we’ll come back again."

"It is now." Aziraphale smiles at him. "I just thought you'd want to spend some time in space first, dear. I know it's been a long time."

"Time's not even the word for it," Crowley says. "It was before that." His hands brush against the airlock, and his face changes to the sort of expression he used to only have when he looked at Aziraphale. "Nothing quite like it, is there? Solar flares against your wings."

"I wouldn't know."

Crowley freezes, then slowly turns to look at him. "Angel," he says slowly, low, incredulous, "are you telling me you've been out here all this time and you've never once...stepped outside?"

"I..." Sheepishly, Aziraphale says, "I suppose it never occurred to me."

"'Never occurred' – " Crowley shakes his head. "Right. We're fixing this."

"Now?" Aziraphale asks, startled despite himself.

"Yes, now. Just think of it as oysters, angel." Crowley pauses. "Only better."

Sighing wistfully, Aziraphale says, "I really should have had oysters before we left."

"I said 'better', Aziraphale." And before Aziraphale can stop him, object in any way, he hits the button, and as one set of doors closes and the air whistles away, another set opens.

The emptiness spreads itself before the two of them, the void, the vacuum of space - only that's precisely what Aziraphale doesn't experience. He waits for the fear, the dread, the awe. Only the last comes, deep and profound, hand-in-hand with wonder and delight.

Angels don't have to breathe; nor are they bound by the physics which demand all sorts of cleverness from humans. When Crowley takes his hand, Aziraphale just steps free of the ship and spreads his wings.

The universe is even more than he saw through the window of his archive. With angelic eyes and no barrier, he can see the colours, the solar waves, the points of life joining everything. It occurs to him that he's never been closer to, well, everything. His wings catch /something/ and he bobs in the expanse, just a little. It’s all so vast and eternal and he tries to turn to exclaim to Crowley, only for the lack of inertia to send him spinning. He yelps, soundless without anything to carry it, until Crowley rights him again.

Were he currently breathing, Aziraphale knows that the breath would catch in his throat when he can see Crowley clearly: hovering there, wings spread wide, his hair fanned out around his head in a magnificent halo of his own. And yet, that beauty is only looking at him. Muted light, in the sort of spectrum that a human couldn't begin to imagine, catches on flecks of ice which might have been tears, and yet Crowley is only smiling.

Aziraphale reaches out and brushes his thumb against one shimmering crystal. Crowley glances away, smiling self-deprecatingly, but he doesn't pull back.

"You gave this up?"

"Not much choice in the matter, angel."

"You used to say you could run away whenever you wanted."

"What I wanted was to show you."

Crowley's wings almost blend in, if you didn't think to look. Aziraphale thinks (imagines?) that he can see the stars shining through them, the way they always should have done. They don't talk about before, and Aziraphale won't break that pact now, but nevertheless the enormity fills him: Crowley helped shape this. In many ways, this should be his home, not the Earth, and certainly not Aziraphale. But his demon does not stay still – does not stop changing, and shouldn't be held static by anyone, not even himself.

"'We shall not cease from exploration,'" Aziraphale says, "'and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.'"

Crowley's beautiful faces scrunches up in confusion, wings flicking. Then he groans. "Don't spoil the moment, angel."

"It seemed rather fitting."

"I'm serious, this is all supposed to be lovely and then you go on with your quotes and – "

Aziraphale shuts him up. 

Technically he kisses him, and as Crowley quiets against him it becomes about that and remains there, profound and deep. They turn slowly as the push and pull of them against one another reminds their bodies that there’s no up or down. Occasionally Crowley flicks a wing to right them, or his hand guides one of Aziraphale’s wings so that he can learn. They never stop kissing though. 

There's a whole universe around them. And it can wait, just long enough to remind Crowley yet again that there's love woven into every atom.


End file.
